Semlab had joined an international consortium of researchers, linguistic experts and software developers to create a system that automatically translates relatively small languages.
The focus in the project lies with small languages such as Latvian, Lithuanian, Croatian, etc. and one of the main methods that will be used is Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). SMT systems are built by analyzing huge volumes of parallel corpus and learning translation models from these data. This is particularly tricky with smaller languages since the available corpus data is much smaller.
The project aims at a.o. developing a widget or browser add-on that translates such small languages and is currently under evaluation at the European union.
For more information: Let’sMT! Project website