A Mandarin to Taiwanese Min Nan Machine Translation System with Speech Synthesis of Taiwanese Min Nan

This paper presents a design of a Mandarin to Taiwanese Min Nan (abbreviated as Taiwanese hereafter) machine translation system. It is the first machine translation system which focuses on these two languages. An input Mandarin sentence is segmented, tagged and translated word by word according to the part of speech of each word. The candidates come from a Mandarin-Taiwanese dictionary. If more than one candidate exists, an example base is consulted. When a Mandarin word is not found in the Mandarin-Taiwanese dictionary, it is translated according to a SingleCharacter dictionary. The output can be in terms of either speech or text. For speech output, we also deal with the tone sandhi problem in changing the tone of each Taiwanese syllable. Because the mapping between Taiwanese syllables and Chinese characters is still a subject of disagreement, and the phonetic spelling coding systems are not familiar to everybody, speech output is useful but is also a challenge.