Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Introduction

Language translation has taken much attention recently since it enhances the user’s capability of understanding electronic or contents published by other means in different languages. A considerable number of Machine Translation projects have been developed in Sri Lanka over the past decade. Most projects have attempted to translate from English to Sinhalese. Translations from Sinhala to English have received very less attention, and until now no successful systems have been built. This paper introduces a pilot machine translation system that translates grammatically correct Sinhalese sentences into grammatically correct English sentences in a consistent, quick, accurate and precise manner along with several other features to facilitate the users.

In developing the system all the three “grammatical persons” and all the tenses in the Sinhala language have been considered. There are thirty-two grammatical regulations in the Sinhalese Language to write Sinhalese sentence(s) according to the correct grammar, out of which twenty are for active voice, and twelve for passive voice. Shown below are some example sentences that are derived from the active voice grammatical rules of Sinhalese:

  • මම ගෙදර ගියෙමි.
  • නුඹ පාසලට යන්නෙහි.
  • මිනිස්සු වැඩ කරති.

Out of the twenty regulations for the active voice this system handles for sixteen regulations. It has also been designed to handle sentences with adjectives, adverbs and nouns for periods of time (month, days etc).