Interlingual Machine Translation Approach For Local Languages:Ekegusii- Kiswahili

Abstract

Development of natural language applications for local languages in Africa reqmres innovative approaches since many of these languages are resource scarce. By this we mean that there are hardly any local language corpora and electronic language resources. This work resolves the above problem by building an online language resource and attests the concept of the Interlingual approach for rapid generation of domain specific translations for Ekegusiil and Kiswahili. The results are encouraging and clearly reveal the similarities in the language structure of the two local Kenyan languages, which easily facilitated bidirectional translations and maintained a semantic approach to translation just as a human translator does. Therefore, the approach can be adopted for cost-effective rapid translations of other local languages in Kenya.