Proper Name Machine Translation from Japanese to Japanese Sign Language

This paper describes machine translation of proper names from Japanese to Japanese Sign Language (JSL). “Proper name transliteration” is a kind of machine translation of proper names between spoken languages and involves character-tocharacter conversion based on pronunciation. However, transliteration methods cannot be applied to Japanese-JSL machine translation because proper names in JSL are composed of words rather than characters. Our method involves not only pronunciation-based translation, but also sense-based translation, because kanji, which are ideograms that compose most Japanese proper names, are closely related to JSL words. These translation methods are trained from parallel corpora. The sense-based translation part is trained via phrase alignment in sentence pairs in a Japanese and JSL corpus. The pronunciation-based translation part is trained from a Japanese proper name corpus and then post-processed with transformation rules. We conducted a series of evaluation experiments and obtained 75.3% of accuracy rate, increasing from baseline method by 19.7 points. We also developed a Japanese-JSL proper name translation system, in which the translated proper names are visualized with CG animations.