African languages are numerous, complex and low-resourced. The datasets required for machine translation are difficult to discover, and existing research is hard to reproduce. Minimal attention has been given to machine translation for African languages so there is scant research regarding the problems that arise when using machine translation techniques. To begin addressing these problems, we trained models to translate English to five of the official South African languages (Afrikaans, isiZulu, Northern Sotho, Setswana, Xitsonga), making use of modern neural machine translation techniques. The results obtained show the promise of using neural machine translation techniques for African languages. By providing reproducible publicly-available data, code and results, this research aims to provide a starting point for other researchers in African machine translation to compare to and build upon.
trained Transformer models for English to Setswana on the parallel Autshumato dataset @cite_10 . Data was not cleaned nor was any additional data used. This is the only study reviewed that released datasets and code. performed statistical phrase-based translation for English to Setswana translation. This research used linguistically-motivated pre- and post-processing of the corpus in order to improve the translations. The system was trained on the Autshumato dataset and also used an additional monolingual dataset.
@cite_10
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Translation is an indispensable process for socioeconomic and cultural development in a multilingual society. The use of translation tools such as translation memories and machine translation systems can be beneficial in supporting the human translator. Unfortunately, the availability of these tools is limited for resource-scarce languages. In this paper, we introduce the Autshumato Integrated Translation Environment that facilitates a comprehensive set of translation tools, including machine translation and translation memory. The Autshumato Integrated Translation Environment is specifically developed for translation between the official South African languages, but it is in essence languageindependent and can therefore be used to translate between any language pair.