Enriching English into Sundanese and Javanese translation list using pivot language

Abstract

This paper discusses the problem of sparse translation of English into Sundanese and Javanese that were found in Translator-Gator. Translator-Gator is a language game created by the United Nation Global Pulse, to support the research initiatives in Indonesia. Thousands of keyword were generated and translated from English into some Indonesian local languages using the crowd resource. Unfortunately, many English words are still has no translation in Javanese as well as Sundanese. To overcome this problem we propose a technique to fill the un-translated English words in Javanese and Sundanese using Indonesian translation as a pivot language. Evaluation was made by manually investigated whether each phrase results a proper translation. Experiment shows that our technique results relatively low translation accuracy. Limited coverage of phrase translation list and ambiguous words are identified as causes of translations errors in our technique.