A Machine Translation Method Of Arabic Place Names

Place names are the exclusive names given to geographical entities with specific location and geographical scope,and they are indispensable basic geographic information elements in spatial database."One belt,one road","going global" and other global strategic deployment urgently need support from place names.However,most of the overseas place names are not expressed in Chinese.Only a few small scale data are available in our relevant place names,which is far from meeting the growing demand for global geographic information resources.Arabic plays an important role in the world languages.At present,the translation methods of Arabic place names in China are mainly manual translation.Under the background of large-scale operation,there are defects such as low efficiency,high cost,and difficult to check errors.How to realize the fast translation of Arabic place names is particularly important for enriching the global geographic information resources.This paper aims at the current situation of the research on the machine translation of geographical names in China,where the generic and specific names cannot be distinguished reasonably and the general machine transliteration method is inefficient.By analyzing the lexical structure and phonetic characteristics of Arabic geographical names,a complete machine translation scheme for Arabic geographical names is proposed.(1)The method of distinguishing common name and special name of place names based on statistical model:from the perspective of information theory,the paper analyzes the word formation characteristics of place names,studies the relationship between words,finds the composition law of place name structure,and determines the special name and general name to be distinguished in place names with the help of the attribute of place name category.(2)Rules based transliteration of place names:Based on the basic knowledge of Arabic phonetics,this paper analyzes the Romanization rules of place names in Arabic,determines the syllable division algorithm based on syllable composition rules,and then realizes the transliteration of place names in Arabic by the rule-based transliteration method.In this paper,31786 Egyptian Toponymic data were used to test the effectiveness of this method by comparing the translation results of standard toponyms in the Toponymic translation manual with those of Baidu and Google.Through the evaluation of professional place name translation company,the overall accuracy of the system is 84.9%.This method solves the problem of reasonable distinction of common and special names in the translation of place names,avoids the disadvantages of traditional machine transliteration,greatly saves the labor cost,and has certain reference significance for the translation and production of place names in China.