Machine translation from Catalan to Sardinian: a translation tool for a language in the process of standardisation

Abstract

This article describes the development of a free/open-source rule-based machine translation system for Catalan to Sardinian based on the Apertium platform. Special attention is given to the components of the system related with transfer (structural and lexical) and lexical selection, drawing attention to issues stemming from the current state of the Sardinian written norm. The system has a word-error rate (WER) of 20.5% and a position-independent word-error rate (PER) of 13.9%. We analyse the remaining errors by doing a qualitative analysis of the translation of four articles from the encyclopaedic domain.

Keywords

• sard
• català
• traducció automàtica
• Apertium
• rbmt