travisfoundation/Tigrinya-Parallel-Corpus

A Collection of Parallel English-Tigrinya Translations # The TravisFoundation English-Tigrinya Parallel Corpus A corpus of parallel English-Tigrinya phrases, compiled by Travis Foundation. This parallel corpus' main goal is of course to help progress the path towards English-Tigrinya machine translation. Its secondary aim is to increase (if only by a little) the amount of digital, publicly available samples of the Tigrinya language, spoken by at least 9 million people. ## Basic Properties This parallel corpus uses the simplest possible format, namely a line-by-line format in which line `i` in `some_file_EN` corresponds to line `i` in `some_file_TI`. All files are UTF-8 encoded (Unix line-breaking), which includes the Ge'ez alphabet, the alphabet in which Tigrinya is written. The corpus is left unchanged from its original sources (see section below) which entails partly inconsistent style, e.g. with respect to punctuation, and some linguistic noise. This repository includes simple scripts to normalise the corpus linguistically and regarding punctuation, which may be less useful for the English parts of this corpus but more so for the Tigrinya parts. Some cornerstone statistics of the Travis Foundation corpus: - number of phrases: - number of words: EN, TI - | | TI | EN | |-------| ------------- | ------------- | | number of words | 10k | 20k | | number of characters | 100k | 200k | ## Provenance The majority of this collection of parallel sentences is actually scraped from the Jehova's Witnesses' website, to our knowledge the largest findable collection of texts with both English and Tigrinya version. The X parallel sentences obtained from this source account for Y% of our corpus. We have included this data in our corpus simply for its size but warn against two aspects: First, the data may have some problems in linguistic terms. As an English-Tigrinya parallel corpus, we do not know the process by which the original English texts were translated into Tigrinya and we therefore have no grip on the close …