A translation engine was created for 23 Finno-Ugric languages, including Hungarian

An Estonian translation program is specialised in Finno-Ugric languages, including Hungarian. Researchers at the University of Tartu’s Institute of Computer Science have added Livonian, Komi, Mansi and 14 other Finno-Ugric languages to the university’s machine translation engine.

From now on, the Hungarian language is also available in the translation engine

Researchers at the University of Tartu Institute of Computing have added 14 other Finno-Ugric languages to the university’s machine translation engine, reports player.hu. “Most of these languages have become available for the first time on a public translation engine, as they are not part of Google Translate and other similar services”, the university said. The translation engine supports a total of 23 Finno-Ugric languages.

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Among the languages are:

• Estonian
• Finnish
• Livonian
• Vót
• Karjalian
• Lud Karjalian
• Ludian
• Vepsze
• Northern Sami
• Southern Sami
• Inari Sami
• Szkolt Sami
• Lule Sami
• Komi
• Komi-Permian
• Udmurt
• Erza
• Moksa
• Manysi
• Khanti
• Hungarian

You can help by editing translations

The research team is now asking speakers and researchers of these languages to help with translations themselves to improve the quality of the program. You can help by editing the translations on translate.ut.ee if you know a given language really well. Texts written in these languages such as poems, articles, books and the like are also of great help and can be sent to ping@tartunlp.ai.

According to Lisa Yankovskaya, a natural language processing researcher at the University of Tartu’s Computer Science Institute, feedback is needed to improve the quality of translation. This is becasue many of these languages have extremely limited resources for creating translation systems. For example, in Hungarian, the amount of digitally accessible data is small.

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The translation engine is open to all users

The goal of the translation engine is to preserve endangered languages. However, Yankovskaya noted that some fields may need machine translation to understand texts without learning the language. The translation system is open to all users, and the software is open source.

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Source: player.hu