---
title: "The Construction of a Mixe Variant Parallel — Ruiz 2026"
description: "Machine translation for Mixe (Ayuuk), an Indigenous language of Oaxaca, Mexico, is limited by scarce data and by licensing barriers."
authors: ["Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz", "Delfino Zacarias Marquez", "Martha Elba Ramírez Andrés", "Victoriano Santiago Cayetano", "Jonathan Santiago Antonio", "Carlos Daniel Hernández Mena"]
year: 2026
venue: "Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.274/"
doi: "10.63317/4iizmd3in9aj"
licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ruiz-2026-construction-mixe-variant-parallel-corpus/"
---
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# The Construction of a Mixe Variant Parallel Corpus

**Authors:** [Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ivan-vladimir-meza-ruiz/), Delfino Zacarias Marquez, Martha Elba Ramírez Andrés, Victoriano Santiago Cayetano, Jonathan Santiago Antonio, [Carlos Daniel Hernández Mena](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/carlos-daniel-hernandez-mena/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.274/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.274.pdf) · [DOI 10.63317/4iizmd3in9aj](https://doi.org/10.63317/4iizmd3in9aj) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7160189149)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
Machine translation for Mixe (Ayuuk), an Indigenous language of Oaxaca, Mexico, is limited by scarce data and by licensing barriers. Earlier Mixe–Spanish resources either disappeared, as with the JW300 portion that was withdrawn over copyright, or mixed openly licensed Spanish text with restricted Mixe translations. The authors focus on the San Juan Guichicovi (SJGu) variety of Isthmus Mixe (mir) and build a parallel corpus that can be fully redistributed. They adapt the approach used for the Wixarika corpus: Spanish source texts in the public domain, such as Grimm and Andersen tales, are translated by native speakers. This project differs in two ways. It hired professional translators from the region instead of relying on volunteers, and it set an open license for all components from the start. The paper also discusses Mexico's long copyright term and the moral rights of Indigenous creators. The conclusions describe two corpora, each tied to a different Mixe variant, along with a baseline MT system for each. For SJGu, adding the newly translated sentences improves on previously reported results. The authors acknowledge that the corpus is still small.

## Key points
- Mixe has about 139,760 speakers according to the 2020 INEGI census, making it Mexico's 16th largest Indigenous language. The SJGu municipality has 29,802 inhabitants, of whom roughly 18,000 speak Mixe.
- Prior resources:
  - The JW300 corpus contained Coatlán Mixe (mco) but is now deprecated.
  - Zacarías Márquez and Meza Ruiz (2021) released a corpus with mixed licensing.
- The methodology extends Mager et al. (2018), the approach behind the Wixarika–Spanish corpus. It uses public-domain Spanish sources and paid bilingual translators.
- The release is under CC BY-NC-SA at gitlab.com/l52mas/ayuuk-spanish.
- In Mexico, works enter the public domain only 100 years after the author's death, and there is no clear fair-use exception. This makes building corpora from existing translations difficult.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{ruiz2026construction,
  title = {{The Construction of a Mixe Variant Parallel Corpus}},
  author = {Ruiz, Ivan Vladimir Meza and Marquez, Delfino Zacarias and Andrés, Martha Elba Ramírez and Cayetano, Victoriano Santiago and Antonio, Jonathan Santiago and Mena, Carlos Daniel Hernández},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/4iizmd3in9aj},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4iizmd3in9aj}
}
```

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