Research And Application On Foreign Geographical Name Translation System

Place name is an important part of the national basic geographic information and plays an important role in people's daily life.For the government,place name data can strongly support political contacts,cultural exchange,economic transactions between countries and areas.For the army,accurate and comprehensive global geographical names information have key practical and deeply strategic significance in safeguarding national sovereignty,ensuring national security and improving national defense ability.With the rapid development of science and technology,communication between countries and regions is becoming more and more frequent.The need for establishment of a global geographical name database in China is also increasingly urgent.But at present foreign geographical names data acquisition and translation are lagging far behind.The fundamental reason lies in the backwardness of technical means.Therefore,this paper mainly research on foreign names data acquisition and translation.First and foremost,We have collected and analyzed the content and format of the data in the foreign mainstream geographical name database.Then,We have established the attribution correspondence.Through FME software,we have processed data and formed a complete set of global geographical names data source.Besides,we research on place name translation and specific terms transliteration and then sum up the work flow.Through the summary of the experience knowledge of language experts,the initial division of the syllables to the place name is realized.According to the experiment calculation,after preliminary division,the number of database queries can be reduced by about 70%,and the efficiency is greatly improved.By referring to the two way matching algorithm and the idea of statistical word segmentation,we fillfulled specific terms transliteration and found some new syllabification rules which can supplement expert experience knowledge.These findings further improve the accuracy of syllabic division.Last but not least,we have developed a multi-country,multilingual place name translation software.At present,the software has implemented the romanization(or original)place name translation function in 14 languages,and the interface is reserved for easy extension.Through testing,we find some common problems and fix it.So The correct rate of translation has been improved.For example,the correct rate of Hindi names increased from 83.7% to 97.6% and the correct rate of the Burmese names increased from 72.4% to 89.8%.Higher than artificial translation level.The development of this software makes it possible to produce large-scale,engineering place names.It also lays the foundation for the establishment of a global geographical name database.At present,we have used the software to translate about 550 thousand geographical names in India and about 50 thousand geographical names in Myanmar.After review and acceptance,the batch data has been imported into the global geographical name database and greatly enrich this database.