Machine translation system for agriculture domain – issues and challenges

Abstract

Agriculture industry is the fast growing economic industry in Sri Lanka including rural-urban cities around the country. Language barrier is a critical issue in the agriculture industry, as a result of the large number of people with different language ability, work together. Machine Translation system is one of the successful solutions for the language barrier, which is used by many countries and successful results have been achieved. English to Sinhala Machine Translation system for agriculture domain can be used as a solution for the language barrier on agriculture industry in Sri Lanka. BEES is a multi-agent based English to Sinhala machine translation system which is successfully works on limited domain. This paper reports a valid attempt to introduce BEES for the agriculture domain in Sri Lanka. Design and implementation of the BEES, identified machine translation issues and challenges in the agriculture domain are also reported in the paper