A Feasibility Study for Chinese-Spanish Statistical Machine Translation

This article presents and describes an experimental prototype system for performing Chinese-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-Chinese machine translation. The system is based on the statistical machine translation (SMT) framework and, more specifically, it implements the bilingual n-gram SMT approach. Since, as far as we know, no large Chinese-Spanish parallel corpus is currently available for training purposes, an alternative experimental method for building a training corpus was used. This method is compared, in terms of translation quality, to the simpler approach of using English as a bridge language for performing Chinese-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-Chinese translations.