Selected text machine translator for English to Sinhala

Abstract

Nowadays people are used to read English text online and sometimes prefer to see the meaning of the portions of text in his/her mother tongue. Some computer-based solutions enable the reader copy the desired text to a machine translator and to view the translation. This process is tedious and considerably disturbs the reading. Our research work presents an approach that enables reader to get Sinhala translation of selected English texts without disturbing the process of reading. This research emerges as an updated version of our existing English to Sinhala machine translation system, BEES. The system has been designed with three modules namely BEES client, BEES server and BEES translator. Upon highlighting the text, BEES client reads the selected text and sends it to the BEES sever. The BEES Server reads the text and provides appropriate Sinhala translation using the BEES translator. Three dictionaries namely, English dictionary, Sinhala dictionary, and English-Sinhala bilingual dictionary are used as the lexical resources of the system. The selected text translator of BEES has been tested through human support. Experimental results show that, this system successfully works with more than 80% accuracy.