Precise machine translation of computer science study

Abstract

Higher education in South Africa is, amongst others, characterised by student language diversity while the language of teaching and learning is mainly English. The University of South Africa has a language policy that is based on the notion of functional multilingualism, the implementation of which would benefit from software that provides fast, low-cost and easily accessible solutions to translating key concepts found in study material. We present a prototype translation system in the form of a mobile (Android) application for translating discrete mathematics definitions between English and Afrikaans. The main component of the system is a Grammatical Framework (GF) application grammar which produces syntactically and semantically accurate translations in a high precision domain. The extension of the system to other South African languages is outlined.