Machine translation from Turkish to other Turkic languages and an imlementation for the Azeri languages

Abstract

Machine translation is the application of computers to the translation of texts from one natural language into another. There are three different approaches proposed for machine translation; direct translation, transfer-based translation and interlingua-based translation. Since none of these approaches are suitable for the problem of machine translation from Turkish to other Turkic languages, we propose a lexicon-based approach. As the sentence syntax is similar for Turkish and the Azeri language, chosen as a representative of Turkic languages, we do not employ any syntactic analysis. Morphological and semantic analyses are carried out for the translation. Translation can not be viewed as a word for word translation even though the source and the target languages have a similar syntactic structure. This is due to the existence of ambiguous words with multiple meanings. The subject of the ambiguity in translation from Turkish to Azeri is explained and possible ways to resolve the ambiguities are put forward. A translator from ITurkish to Azeri is implemented using the proposed approach. The results obtained from the translator show that the proposed approach is feasible for machine translation from Turkish to the Azeri language.