Development of English to Hausa Machine Translation System
Safiriyu I.
Eludiora, Beatrice O. Afolabi and Abdulrahman A. Sanusi
Review I Published
September, 2016
Research Journal of Engineering and Technology Vol. 2 (1), pp. 12-32.
ABSTRACT
The Hausa language is one of the major indigenous languages
in Nigeria. Hausa language speakers cover the Northern
parts of Nigeria, West Africa and Africa in general. Hausa
language used in media houses for news and in Schools for
teaching. The development of English to Hausa machine
translation (E-HMT) system will assist the interested
learners to learn the language. Hausa is a tone language
like Yorùbá. It was observed that the tone marks and
diacritics are not used in writing unlike Yorùbá that the
tone marks and diacritics must be used. The grammar
structure of the two languages are subject verb object (SVO),
but with some differences. Findings show that Google has
developed E-HMT using the data driven approach. In the study
reported in this paper rule-based approach was used to
develop the E-HMT system. The E-HMT system can translate
simple sentences. Home domain terminologies were used for
the development of E-HMT system database. Some linguistics
and computing theories and rules were used for the E-HMT
translation process. The re-write rules were designed for
the two languages. The re-write rules were tested using
JFLAP. Unified Modeling Language (UML) was used to design
the software. Java programming language was used for the
implementation of the software. The E-HMT system could have
been evaluated using Mean opinion score, but a good number
of Hausa speakers in our community are not literate. The
questionnaires were administered at Kaduna. We compared the
E-HMT system outputs with the Hausa Google translator. The
results show that E-HMT system performs better than Hausa
Google translator.
Key words: Hausa, Ruled-based, re-write rules, ambiguity and Tagging.
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