This is my Masters dissertation. This was the first thesis done on using real-world low resource languages to improve their translation to English.
##Description
This dissertation is about using the technique of triangulation to translate 4 low-resource languages into English. The 4 languages are:
###Why those 4 languages?
After the devastating earthquake in Haiti in January, 2010, Red Cross and other organizations setup a helpline number 4636 where people in need of help sent messages. As helpful as this was, not many people knew the native language. In 2011, a workshop was held where scientists were asked to improve the translation on the messages sent after the earthquake. Various approaches were tried to improve the translation on them.
In case of Mawukakan and Maninkakan, these are languages spoken by less than half a million people in West Africa. The amount of resources they have is very scarce.
Malagasy is a language like Haitian Creole, it has multiple influences and less resources.
##What is triangulation?
Triangulation is the approach of translation a sentence in source language S to target language T through one or more intermediate languages. But, this is not one technique. Rather, there are multiple ways in which you can translate a sentence in the sounrce to target language.
In other words, there are multiple ways in which the intermediate languages are used. We go into a lot more detail about these aspects in the thesis!