English – Afaan Oromoo Machine Translation: An Experiment Using Statistical Approach
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Date
2009-04
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Machine Translation (MT) refers to the use of a machine for performing translation
task which converts text in one Natural Language into another Natural Language. It
can have many applications like cross-linguistic information retrieval and speech to
speech translation systems. It can also assist professional translators by producing
draft quality output that reduces cost that would be incurred if translation and typing
was done manually from scratch.
English is the lingua franca of online information and Afaan Oromoo is one of the
most resource scarce languages. For this reason, monolingual Afaan Oromoo
speakers need to use documents written in other languages, among which English is
the most popular one. To satisfy this need, translation of the English documents to
Afaan Oromoo, and thus, making these online documents available in Afaan Oromoo
is vital in addressing the language barrier thereby reducing the effect of digital divide.
Therefore, this thesis is focused on the development of a prototype English-Afaan
Oromoo machine translation system using statistical approach, i.e, without explicit
formulation of linguistic rules, as this approach involves low cost and swiftest way
available these days. Using limited corpus of about 20, 000 bilingual sentences, a
translation accuracy of 17.74% was achieved.
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English – Afaan Oromoo Machine Translation