Machine Transliteration

This paper is a work in progress by Francis Keith

Citation

"Machine Transliteration", K. Knight and J. Graehl, CL 1998

Online Version

An online version of the paper is available here [1]

Summary

This paper examines using FSTs to solve the problem of transliteration in machine translation. Transliteration is the process of translating proper names and technical terms. In some cases, this is easier than others. The paper specifically examines Japanese-English transliteration.

The Problem

Japanese employs a very different phonetic alphabet from English. However, in the case of proper names, this often means doing a conversion from the English name into a more Japanese pronunciation. One example of this is that Japanese has no differentiation between 'L' and 'R', or 'F' and 'H'. While this may be easy in English-to-Japanese transliteration, it is significantly more difficult and less forgiving to do Japanese-to-English transliterations.