Developing English-Tigrinya Machine-readable Bilingual Dictionary: an Input for Machine Translation

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Date

2001-06

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Addis Ababa University

Abstract

The cultural, political, social, scientific and technological information of the advanced world including our country is mostly published in English language. Although English language is widely used in the country, the language barrier makes it difficult to use such information by the majority of the population.Translation is the best solution to overcome such language barrier. To translate such information to local languages using the human skill is on the one hand the oldest and the most accurate method on the other hand it is expensive and time consuming task. Nowadays, it is possible to translate a digitized text from one language into another using machine translation systems. As a result, cost is minimized and speed is maximized. However, to develop a machine translation system is a complex task. To reduce the complexity, the other alternative is to develop translation modules and integrate them rather than to develop self-contained and independent systems. Machine-readable dictionary is the main component or module of the machine translation system. This study therefore focuses on developing English-Tigrinya Bilingual Dictionary that can be used as input for machine translation system. The stated dictionary contains a lexicon for English and Tigrinya nouns. The noun forms and functions of both languages have been discussed and an attempt is made to compare the major similarities and differences.Based on the noun forms and functions of both languages, the bilingual dictionary is designed and the database for storing the lexicon is constructed. Next, a list of hundred English nouns and hundred Tigrinya nouns are entered to the database. Finally, an algorithm is developed to translate English noun forms to Tigrinya noun forms.

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Information Science

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