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