Abstract:
Machine Translation (MT) or Automatic Translation is generally concern about
automating all or part of the process of translating one human language to another
language. These human or natural languages bear similarities as well as differences due
to the way these languages have organized. Therefore, translating from one natural
language into another natural language depends on their vocabulary, grammar, and
conceptual structure. The translation Text-To-Speech (TTS) can be considered as the
automatic production of speech, through a grapheme-to-phoneme transcription of the
sentences to utter. To our knowledge there is no such a system in Sri Lanka that could
translate simple English sentences into its equivalent in Sinhala with the relevant speech
synthesis. In a country like Sri Lanka where the language barrier is a major issue, this
type of systems will definitely help to reduce these language problems. With language
translation coupled with TTS synthesis would be a good Computer Aided Learning
Technique, that will provide a tool to learn English effectively.
This paper discusses an approach to translation with a speech synthesizer of a given
simple English sentence into its Sinhala equivalent. The problem of translation is
handled in two phases, namely the lexical selection, where appropriate target-language
lexical items are chosen for each source-language lexical item and then the lexical
reordering, where the chosen target-language lexical items are arranged to produce a
meaningful target language string. Together with translator, here we use the
concatenative synthesizer which is embedded in the speech units to be chained up. In
our speech synthesizer, speech units that are typically smaller than words are used to
synthesize speech from arbitrary input text. Speech units are algorithmically extracted
from a phonetically transcribed speech data set. The unit selection process involves a
combinatorial search over the entire speech corpus using the search algorithms.
Due to the practical difficulties and complexities this translation and TTS is tested only
for the simple English sentences in which only SVO (Subject/Verb/Object) structure can
be seen.
