Translation between English and Mauritian Creole: A statistical machine translation approach

Abstract

Translation between one language and another is extensively carried out by students, tourists and business persons. The importance of translation cannot be underestimated, especially with the number of translation devices in use by travellers. Google Translate has set up a multilingual translation system and it is regularly used by people all over the world. In Mauritius, translation of the Mauritian Creole language is not available from Google Translate as the available size of the parallel corpora is quite small. The objective of this study is, therefore, to develop a web-based system for the translation between English language and the Mauritian Creole language for learning the two languages. This project on machine translation for the Mauritian Creole language is a starting point that will benefit the Mauritian population at large as well as the Tourism and Business sectors. Statistical Machine Translation, which is the state of-the-art technique, has been adopted for translation between English and Mauritian Creole language. In this paper, the translation between English and Mauritian Creole language is explored.