IFE-MT: An English-to-Yorùbá Machine Translation System

Although the quality of the output produced by modern machine translation (MT) systems still fall short of expert human translator, their applications are becoming more common and increasingly sophisticated. The usefulness of modern MT systems in the translation of routine expressions from one language to another has been demonstrated in the areas of business, tourism, diplomacy and education for European and Asian languages. The diversity of African culture and languages suggests that MT technology can become a valuable tool in facilitating better communication within the continent with a potential of reducing conflict arising from language divide. MT systems could also assists in the sharing of knowledge by way of the translation of textual educational resources which are mostly available in European languages.
In this presentation, we shall discuss IFE-MT (https://ifecisrg.org/ifemt) a machine translation system for translating English statements into Yorùbá. We will discuss the theoretical and practical challenges we encountered during the development of the system and how they were addressed. We will also discuss the design of the language resource and the system architecture in terms of its structure and configuration as well as the software design. Furthermore, a hands on demonstration of the prototype software will be presented. Finally, our ongoing work aimed at improving the quality of the MT system’s translations and its extension to other African languages will be discussed.