Theoretical based approach to English to Sinhala machine translation

Abstract

Machine translation is a log felt need of the countries those who use English as a second language. Due to inherent complexity of natural languages, most of machine translation systems adopt rather ad-hoc strategies such as word level translation without concerning a proper theoretical basis. This has been a major reason for why the developments in natural language processing could not achieve as expected. This paper presents a theoretical-based approach to English-Sinhala machine translation through the concept of Varanagema (conjugation) in Sinhala Language. The theory of Varanagema in Sinhala language handles major language primitives including noun, verbs and prepositions. The concept of Varanagema also drastically reduces the number of word forms to be stored in the dictionaries of the machine translation system. The design, implementation and results of test versions of English-Sinhala machine translation system has been presented in the paper.