Arabic-Malay Machine Translation using Rule-based Approach

Arabic machine translation has been taking place in machine translation projects in recent years. This study concentrates on the translation of Arabic text to its equivalent in Malay language. The problem of this research is the syntactic and morphological differences between Arabic and Malay adjective sentences. The main aim of this study is to design and develop Arabic-Malay machine translation model. First, we analyze the adjective role in the Arabic and Malay languages. Based on this analysis, we identify the transfer bilingual rules form source language to target language so that the translation of source language to target language can be performed by computers successfully. Then, we build and implement a machine translation prototype called AMTS to translate from Arabic to Malay based on rule based approach. The system is evaluated on set of simple Arabic sentences. The techniques used to evaluate the correctness of the system translation are the BLEU metric algorithm and the human judgment. The results of the BLEU algorithm show that the AMTS system performs better than Google in the translation of Arabic sentences into Malay. In addition, the average accuracy given by human judges is 92.3% for our system and 75.3% for Google.