Thai Poetry in Machine Translation: An Analysis of Poetry Translation using Statistical Machine Translation

Abstract

The poetry translation from original language to another is very different from general machine translator because the poem is written with prosody. Thai Poetry is composed with sets of syllables. Those rhymes, existing from stanzas, lines and the text in paragraph of the poetry, may not represent the complete syntax. This research is focus on Google and Bing machine translators and the tuning the prosody on syllable and rhyme. We have compared the errors (in percent), between the standard translators to those translators with tuning. The error rate of both translators before tune them, was at 97 % per rhyme. After tuning them, the percentage of errors decreased down to 60% per rhyme. To evaluate the meaning, concerning the gained results of both kinds of translators, we use BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) metric to compare between reference and candidate. BLEU score of Google is 0.287 and Bing is 0.215. We can conclude that machine translators cannot provide good result for translate Thai poetry. This research should be the initial point for a new kind of innovative machine translators to Thai poetry. Furthermore, it is a way to encourage Thai art created language to the global public as well