Pattern-based English-Latvian Toponym Translation

Due to their linguistic and extra-linguistic nature toponyms deserve a special treatment when they are translated. The paper deals with issues related to automated translation of toponyms from English into Latvian. Translation process allows us to translate not only toponyms from a dictionary, but out-of-vocabulary toponyms as well. Translation of out-of-vocabulary toponyms is divided into three steps: source string normalization, translation, and target string normalization. Translation step implies application of translation strategies and linguistic toponym translation patterns. 10,000 UK-related toponyms from Geonames were used as a development set. The developed methods have been evaluated on a test set: the accuracy of translation is 67% for the whole test set, 58% for oneword toponymic units, and 81% for multiword toponyms.