Morisia 1.0

Cette application traduit le créole mauricien en anglais et l'anglais en créole mauricien

Popular online translation services such as Google Translate and Microsoft (Bing) Translator do not currently cater for Kreol Morisien (Mauritian Creole) as it is very challenging to build neural models for under-resource languages. A deep-learning approach based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) was used to undertake machine translation. A dataset of 25,000 sentence pairs (parallel texts in English and Kreol Morisien) was fed into the system to build the translation models. The models were consequently tested with 1000 new sentences. The translations were evaluated using the standard BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) score. The BLEU score measures the overlap between the automated translation and the human translation. The overlap is calculated based on single words (unigrams) and also on n-grams consisting of 2, 3 and 4 continuous words. This innovative translation system is available as an online service at translatekreol.mu and also as an Android app on Google Play Store. This long-term interdisciplinary research is the first automatic translation system for Kreol Morisien which delivers human-level quality translations. This user-friendly system will be very useful to any citizen of the Republic of Mauritius, as well as to foreign students, tourists and other prospective individuals willing to learn Kreol Morisien, a unique language on its own.