Interlingual Machine Translation Approach For Local Languages:Ekegusii- Kiswahili
Abstract
Development of natural language applications for local languages in Africa reqmres
innovative approaches since many of these languages are resource scarce. By this we mean
that there are hardly any local language corpora and electronic language resources. This work
resolves the above problem by building an online language resource and attests the concept
of the Interlingual approach for rapid generation of domain specific translations for
Ekegusiil and Kiswahili. The results are encouraging and clearly reveal the similarities in the
language structure of the two local Kenyan languages, which easily facilitated bidirectional
translations and maintained a semantic approach to translation just as a human translator
does. Therefore, the approach can be adopted for cost-effective rapid translations of other
local languages in Kenya.
Publisher
University of Nairobi School of computing and informatics