machine translation

Current research is focussed on resources for corpus development

Google translate is now available for Swahili

A small but functional automatic translator English to Swahili

Apertium is an open-source machine translation platform, initially aimed at related-language pairs but recently expanded to deal with more divergent language pairs (such as English–Catalan). The platform provides (a) a language-independent machine translation engine (b) tools to manage the linguistic data necessary to build a machine translation system for a given language pair and (c) linguistic data for a growing number of language pairs.

Current released language pairs include:

* Spanish–Catalan
* Spanish–Portuguese
* Spanish–Galician
* Occitan–Catalan
* French–Catalan
* English–Catalan
* Romanian-Spanish

With the following under development:

* English-Afrikaans
* French-Spanish

Try it out:

* https://xixona.dlsi.ua.es/apertium-unstable/

SALAMA is a rule-based system for managing a number of applications on Swahili. It includes a tokenizer, morphological analyzer, morphological disambiguator, semantic disambiguator, syntactic analyzer, and a text-based machine translation system from Swahili to English.
In morphology we have earlier used finite state methods with two-level description. Recently we have developed an alternative method using a combination of different rule types. We have used pattern matching rules for initial analysis (sufficient e.g. for a spell checker), and the accurate analysis with due ambiguity is produced with post-processing rules.
In disambiguation and syntactic mapping we have used a Constraint Grammar parser (CG2), licensed from Connexor. This parser is also used in isolating and handling multi-word expressions.
SALAMA includes also a number of rules for constituent re-ordering, and for transferring the grammatical and lexical information from Swahili into correct English language.

Information on the Machine Translation project by the African Language Research Project.