A Mandarin to Taiwanese Min Nan Machine Translation System with Speech Synthesis of Taiwanese Min Nan

This paper presents a design of a Mandarin to Taiwanese Min Nan (abbreviated as Taiwanese hereafter) machine translation system. It is the first machine translation system which focuses on these two languages. An input Mandarin sentence is segmented, tagged and translated word by word according to the part of speech of each word. The candidates come from a Mandarin-Taiwanese dictionary. If more than on candidate exists, an example base is consulted. When a Mandarin word is not found in the Mandarin-Taiwanese dictionary, it is translated according to a Single-Character dictionary. The output can be in terms of either speech or test. For speech output, we also deal with the tone sandhi problem in changing the tone of each characters is still a subject of disagreement, and the phonetic spelling coding systems are not familiar to everybody, speech output is useful but is also a challenge.