An overview of the EtsaTrans machine translation system: compilation of an administrative domain

Abstract

The EtsaTrans machine translation system has been in development at the University of the Free State for the last four years and is currently the only machine translation system being developed in South Africa for specialised and nongeneral translation needs. The purpose of this exposition is to present the program through its phases of development, and to report on current levels of performance. We analyse the output, the size of the database, and then propose the future implementation of a part of speech tagger and word stemmer into the program to improve its linguistic performance. Our goal with the system is not to translate all types of document, but to work in a specialised domain that will allow the system to translate documents that are repetitive in nature. This will enable translators to spend more time on non-repetitive subject matter. By capturing the nature of the language of such repetitive documents in the database, we are able to create a standardised language usage for the specialised domain.