The Challenging Task of Translating the Language of Tango

It is necessary to review the performance of Machine Translation software when they process low-resource languages. Our case study will be the language used in Tango songs. Tango is a challenging subject: in its lyrics, appear customary beliefs, social forms, and idiosyncratic expressions typical of the Argentinian culture from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, using Lunfardo as the predominant sublanguage. We address the problem of translating a Tango song lyrics to English. We look at the translations produced by Google Translator and DeepL and we compare them with translations produced by accessing handcrafted linguistic resources specifically developed for Rioplatense Spanish.