Phoneme-based English-Amharic Statistical Machine Translation

This research considers the application of Statistical method to automatic Machine Translation (MT) from English to Amharic. The research focuses on improving the translation quality by applying phonemic transcription on the target side, which is Amharic. Accordingly, the BLEU score results for the phoneme-based EASMT system is 37.53% a gain of 2.21 BLEU point from another baseline phrase-based EASMT with a BLEU score result of 35.32%. This clearly shows that phoneme-based translation outperforms the baseline system.