Aindra T. 2025 | BASIS Independent Silicon Valley
- Project Title: Burmese-English Machine Translation Accuracy
- BASIS Independent Advisor: Ms. Canevaro
- Internship Location: Frontiir
- Onsite Mentor: Phyo Kyaw, Director of Engineering at Frontiir
The vast majority of my research will be done completely digitally. Before beginning my actual project, I will conduct more internet research on more technical details of machine translation as well as the algorithms behind the evaluation metrics I discussed earlier, such as BLEU and RIBES. The project itself will involve translating English and Burmese sentences on different platforms and then evaluating their accuracy using existing metrics. Depending on time, I may also ask bilingual human judges to rate translations. My final product will be a research paper explaining the results.
My Posts
Week 6: Preliminary Findings - ALT
April 21, 2025
Hello everyone! In this post, I’ll be going over a few specific observations I’ve made regarding Google’s and Facebook’s translations of ALT sentences. Expected Results Both platforms have difficulty translating words with multiple meanings; for example, the word “အမြှုပ်” can refer to both bullet shells and foam, and although it was mentioned in the context […]
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Week 5: Linguistic Features, Part 2
April 21, 2025
Hello everyone! This week, I’ll be going over a few other linguistic differences between Burmese and English. Articles Like most non-European languages, Burmese does not have articles (Dryer, 2013). Therefore, knowing what articles to use in an English translation is dependent on context. Using “a” instead of “the” rarely has a major impact on the […]
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Week 4: Linguistic Features, Part 1
April 21, 2025
Hello everyone! This week, I’ll be explaining some linguistic features of Burmese that might raise problems when translating to and from English. Diglossia Diglossia is when one language community speaks two forms, or registers, of a language in different contexts. In Burmese, these two registers are the literary and the spoken. The two registers use […]
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Week 3: I Lied
April 21, 2025
Hello readers! So, it turns out that I might not actually be using all the translation accuracy metrics I spent the previous two blog posts explaining. Since prior research (Aye & Soe, 2024; Hlaing et al., 2021) had used these metrics, I thought they would be effective here as well; however, when we went through […]
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