A Translator from Sinhala to English and English to Sinhala (SEES)

Abstract

This paper presents a rule based machine translation system which is capable of translating sentences from Sinhala to English and vice versa. This is the first Sinhala to English and English to Sinhala machine translation system which comes with features such as a Sinhalese font translator, which is capable of interpreting Sinhalese words written in English characters (Singlish) to Sinhala characters, and an English grammar and spell checker. An entered sentence to the system will be tokenized and translated according to a rule. When translating Sinhala sentences to English the user input should be in Singlish and when translating English sentences to Sinhala input should be in English. The main objective of this translator is to enable a smooth flow translation of words, sentences and paragraphs to locals as well as foreigners and thereby eliminate the language barrier. A considerable amount of rules, patterns and words of both languages were used to develop this system. With 87% accuracy this pilot machine translation system translated 500 grammatically well-structured Sinhala sentences to English and 150 grammatically well-structured English sentences to Sinhala. The system is capable of translating approximately 70 sentences in one minute. © 2012 IEEE.