Wednesday, 9 May 2007

Sinhala-Tamil-English Traslator that works

I was one day looking for Sinhala translation for the word "delivery" during the translation of an Information technology article from English to Sinhala. I found this online site and type my word in. It was a hilarious surprise, for the translation it gave me was "prasuthya" (deliver a baby).

I have found it hard to find a good service which would help me find a meaning of an English word in Sinhala, or a Sinhala word in Tamil or.. what ever the combinations I could come up with these three languages.

It's ironic that sometimes you don't see what's under your own nose. I found this free service hosted by the University of Colombo School of Computing, Language Technology Research Laboratory. It is a lexicon not a dictionary. It has a huge collection of words and most of the time it offers the translations to the other language(s) or else, it at leasts offers the meaning. I think they are still working on it since I still can't find the meaning for "delivery", but it is much better than anything I have come across.

Visit http://www.ucsc.cmb.ac.lk/ltrl/services/lexicon/

3 comments:

Mahasen said...

In fact, "Prasuthiya" Is not that wrong for the meaning of delivery. It just might not be suitable in your specific case. The meaning of "Prasuthiya" is more like donate/hand over.
I have seen instances in which "prasuthiya" is used for other things.

maf said...

If this works it would be a fantastic contribution. they should link it to something like http://bablefish.altavista.com

However I have not been able to visit the link yet .. keeps saying taking too long to respond.

Hakim said...

Yep Mahasen, it is correct. But in a context of an IT document, it's hilarious.