Automatic Transliteration of Proper Names from Somali to English

Abstract

Transliterating of proper names is the process of converting words from source natural language (such as Somali) to a target natural language (such as English) while maintaining language pronunciation. Proper names and technical words are challenging in bilingual translation systems and also in Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) applications, due to their absence from most dictionaries.  In this paper, we study an automatic transliteration from Somali to English; which is an under-studied problem. Our Somali-English transliteration system uses transliteration rules based on the orthographic mapping of the source language characters to the characters of the target language. We also propose an alignment method that maps the Somali characters when there is no direct matching character to get accurate transliteration in English. Our novel approach particularly enhances Somali-English transliteration.