English to Bangla Phrase-Based Machine Translation

Machine Translation (MT) is the task of automatically translating a text from one language to another. In this work we describe a phrase-based Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system that translates English sentences to Bangla. A transliteration module is added to handle outof-vocabulary (OOV) words. This is especially useful for low-density languages like Bangla for which only a limited amount of training data is available. Furthermore, a special component for handling preposition is implemented to treat systematic grammatical differences between English and Bangla. We have shown the improvement of our system through effective impacts on the BLEU, NIST and TER scores. The overall BLEU score of our system is 11.7 and for short sentences it is 23.3.