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Published on March 31, 2008

TCL co-director Virach Sornlertlamvanich said the project followed a memorandum of understanding signed by the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) with Laos for technology transfer.

Virach said as Laos was facing problems in building its language database, the lab worked on developing the Thai-Lao translation software so that Laos could use Thai language resources and extend its language development programme.

The translation engine being developed under the project will help easy translation of Thai to Lao and Lao to Thai. Virach said this part of the project is made slightly easier by the fact that the two languages share  similarities.

The team spent two months working on the Thai-Lao MT engine and the accuracy of the software has now reached 70 per cent.

"We found that the pronunciation of the two languages is similar, so we use a technique to convert a Thai word into the Thai phonetic first.

"This is then translated into the Lao phonetic before finally being translated to the Lao word," Virach said.

This technique, he said, allowed the team to speed up the development of the translation software.

Virach said the development of the Thai-Lao translation engine will help Laos build up a language database faster.

The Thai language software has an engine that allows the translation of English and Japanese words.

The new software will allow the translated Thai versions to then be converted to Lao.

"Since Thai language has a lot of translation resources with many languages, we can use it as a medium to help Laos gain a stronger language database. We plan to utilise TCL's machine translation technology, which was developed to support other languages including English and Japanese, to build this database," he said.

Virach said, for example, Laos could use this technology to create an English dictionary, using the Thai-English machine translation software along with the Thai-Lao software.

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation