Japanese-Sinhalese machine translation system Jaw/Sinhalese

Abstract

This paper describes a machine translation system, J aw I Sinhalese, that translates Japanese into Sinhalese (Sinhala). This is the first Japanese-Sinhalese machine translation system. Both Japanese and Sinhalese are agglutinative languages. The Japanese language contains bunsetsu (Japanese basic linguistic units), which consist of a content word (a lexical root) with one or more function words. Sinhalese also has bunsetsu-Mks units, but the grammatical structure is not necessarily fully revealed. The paper proposes a method of analysis for the bunsetsustructure of Sinhalese which shares features with Japanese, and translation solutions for Japanese function words after predicates and nouns. Function words after predicates express tense, modality, conjunctions, etc., while function words after nouns express the case, topic, thematic roles, etc. This paper clarifies,the bunsetsu-stmctme of Sinhalese. It also distinguishes case marker (a leading group of function words after nouns) correspondences using three types of pattern-based translation rules and solves the multi-layered problem of the translation of function words after a predicate by means of translation rules in a table format. Translations were implemented on the pilot machine translation system, J aw I Sinhalese. As an experiment, 200 sample sentences were evaluated. The results (72% rate of success) indicated that this approach is within an acceptable accuracy range.