Tapadoir: developing a statistical machine translation engine and associated resources for Irish

Tapadoir (from the Irish ´ tapa ‘fast’ and the nominal suffix -oir ´ ) is a statistical machine translation (SMT) project, funded by the Irish government. This work was commissioned to help government translators meet the translation demands which have arisen from the Irish language’s status as an official EU and national language. The development of this system, which translates English into Irish (a morphologically rich, low-resourced minority language), has produced an interesting set of challenges. These challenges have inspired a creative response to the lack of data and NLP tools available for the Irish language and have also resulted in the development of new resources for the Irish linguistic and NLP community. We show that our SMT system out-performs Google TranslateTM (a widely used general-domain SMT system) as a result of steps we have taken to tailor translation output to the user’s specific needs.