Automatic Translation Between Kreol Morisien and English Using the Marian Machine Translation Framework
Kreol Morisien is a vibrant and expressive language that reflects the multicultural heritage of Mauritius. There are different versions of Kreol languages. While Kreol Morisien is spoken in Mauritius, Kreol Rodrige is spoken only in Rodrigues, and they are distinct languages. Being spoken by only ab...
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2025-02-01
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| author | Zaheenah Beebee Jameela Boodeea Sameerchand Pudaruth Nitish Chooramun Aneerav Sukhoo |
| author_facet | Zaheenah Beebee Jameela Boodeea Sameerchand Pudaruth Nitish Chooramun Aneerav Sukhoo |
| author_sort | Zaheenah Beebee Jameela Boodeea |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Kreol Morisien is a vibrant and expressive language that reflects the multicultural heritage of Mauritius. There are different versions of Kreol languages. While Kreol Morisien is spoken in Mauritius, Kreol Rodrige is spoken only in Rodrigues, and they are distinct languages. Being spoken by only about 1.5 million speakers in the world, Kreol Morisien falls in the category of under-resourced languages. Initially, Kreol Morisien lacked a formalised writing system, with many people using different spellings for the same words. The first step towards standardisation of writing Kreol Morisien was after the publication of the Kreol Morisien orthography in 2011 and Kreol Morisien grammar in 2012 by the Kreol Morisien Academy. Kreol Morisien obtained a national position in the year 2012 when it was introduced in educational organisations. This was a major breakthrough for Kreol Morisien to be recognised as a national language on the same level as English, French, and other oriental languages. By providing a means for Kreol Morisien speakers to connect with others, a translation system will help to preserve and strengthen the identity of the language and its speakers in an increasingly globalized world. The aim of this paper is to develop a translation system for Kreol Morisien and English. Thus, a dataset consisting of 50,000 parallel Kreol Morisien and English sentences was created, where 48,000 sentence pairs were used to train the models, while 1000 sentences were used for evaluation and another 1000 sentences were used for testing. Several machine translation systems such as statistical machine translation, open-source neural machine translation, a Transformer model with attention mechanism, and Marian machine translation are trained and evaluated. Our best model, using MarianMT, achieved a BLEU score of 0.62 for the translation of English to Kreol Morisien and a BLEU score of 0.58 for the translation of Kreol Morisien into English. To our knowledge, these are the highest BLEU scores that are available in the literature for this language pair. A high-quality translation tool for Kreol Morisien will facilitate its integration into digital platforms. This will make previously inaccessible knowledge more accessible, as the information can now be translated into the mother tongue of most Mauritians with reasonable accuracy. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-ebf2bbd0e6454f9d8d2edc7fa622de47 |
| institution | DOAJ |
| issn | 2227-9709 |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2025-02-01 |
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| spelling | doaj-art-ebf2bbd0e6454f9d8d2edc7fa622de472025-08-20T02:42:31ZengMDPI AGInformatics2227-97092025-02-011211610.3390/informatics12010016Automatic Translation Between Kreol Morisien and English Using the Marian Machine Translation FrameworkZaheenah Beebee Jameela Boodeea0Sameerchand Pudaruth1Nitish Chooramun2Aneerav Sukhoo3Faculty of Information, Communication and Digital Technologies, University of Mauritius, Moka 80837, MauritiusICT Department, Faculty of Information, Communication and Digital Technologies, University of Mauritius, Moka 80837, MauritiusDepartment of Computer Science and Digital Technologies, School of Architecture, Computing and Engineering, University of East London, London E16 2RD, UKCentral Information Systems Division, Ministry of Information Technology, Communication and Innovation, Port Louis 11302, MauritiusKreol Morisien is a vibrant and expressive language that reflects the multicultural heritage of Mauritius. There are different versions of Kreol languages. While Kreol Morisien is spoken in Mauritius, Kreol Rodrige is spoken only in Rodrigues, and they are distinct languages. Being spoken by only about 1.5 million speakers in the world, Kreol Morisien falls in the category of under-resourced languages. Initially, Kreol Morisien lacked a formalised writing system, with many people using different spellings for the same words. The first step towards standardisation of writing Kreol Morisien was after the publication of the Kreol Morisien orthography in 2011 and Kreol Morisien grammar in 2012 by the Kreol Morisien Academy. Kreol Morisien obtained a national position in the year 2012 when it was introduced in educational organisations. This was a major breakthrough for Kreol Morisien to be recognised as a national language on the same level as English, French, and other oriental languages. By providing a means for Kreol Morisien speakers to connect with others, a translation system will help to preserve and strengthen the identity of the language and its speakers in an increasingly globalized world. The aim of this paper is to develop a translation system for Kreol Morisien and English. Thus, a dataset consisting of 50,000 parallel Kreol Morisien and English sentences was created, where 48,000 sentence pairs were used to train the models, while 1000 sentences were used for evaluation and another 1000 sentences were used for testing. Several machine translation systems such as statistical machine translation, open-source neural machine translation, a Transformer model with attention mechanism, and Marian machine translation are trained and evaluated. Our best model, using MarianMT, achieved a BLEU score of 0.62 for the translation of English to Kreol Morisien and a BLEU score of 0.58 for the translation of Kreol Morisien into English. To our knowledge, these are the highest BLEU scores that are available in the literature for this language pair. A high-quality translation tool for Kreol Morisien will facilitate its integration into digital platforms. This will make previously inaccessible knowledge more accessible, as the information can now be translated into the mother tongue of most Mauritians with reasonable accuracy.https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9709/12/1/16Kreol MorisienEnglishMarianMTBLEU scoreparallel sentences |
| spellingShingle | Zaheenah Beebee Jameela Boodeea Sameerchand Pudaruth Nitish Chooramun Aneerav Sukhoo Automatic Translation Between Kreol Morisien and English Using the Marian Machine Translation Framework Informatics Kreol Morisien English MarianMT BLEU score parallel sentences |
| title | Automatic Translation Between Kreol Morisien and English Using the Marian Machine Translation Framework |
| title_full | Automatic Translation Between Kreol Morisien and English Using the Marian Machine Translation Framework |
| title_fullStr | Automatic Translation Between Kreol Morisien and English Using the Marian Machine Translation Framework |
| title_full_unstemmed | Automatic Translation Between Kreol Morisien and English Using the Marian Machine Translation Framework |
| title_short | Automatic Translation Between Kreol Morisien and English Using the Marian Machine Translation Framework |
| title_sort | automatic translation between kreol morisien and english using the marian machine translation framework |
| topic | Kreol Morisien English MarianMT BLEU score parallel sentences |
| url | https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9709/12/1/16 |
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