Transliteration system for English to Sinhala machine translation

Machine translation is a challenging task in natural language processing. Out-of-vocabulary, handling proper nouns and technical terms are some major issues which are common to all machine translation systems. This paper presents a transliteration approach to machine translation from English to Sinhala. We have used finite state automaton to develop transducers for English to Sinhala transliteration. This approach can transliterate the text in original English and Sinhala words that are written using English letters. The transliteration system has been developed using SWI-PROLOG and prolog server page (PSP). English WorldNet and Sinhala Chatbot are used to test the transducers and reasonable results were achieved.