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What is Dobhase?
Dobhase, translated as "interpreter" is an 18 months long project (started in February 2005) on "Online English to Nepali Machine Translation" funded by the PAN ICT R&D Grants program and developed by the Information & Language Processing Research Lab, Kathmandu University in partnership with the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, Nepal.
Dobhase represents itself as a pioneering effort in the history of Machine Translation in Nepal. In a country, where the larger share of the population are English illiterates or do not have the proficiency of English, the essence of such a system appears to be more than relevant so as to get the general gist or communicative understanding of the English text.
Dobhase, as with many other Machine Translation Systems is undoubtedly not a full fledged and a complete system yet. However, the achievements of the current system and the research findings collected in due course of the development are believed to serve as a base for further research and development both in refining the existing system as well as applying other advanced approaches of machine translation. In this regard, the current partner organizations, respectively KU and MPP plan to work further on this project in a long term basis. Right now, Dobhase can be accessed at the URL
http://www.nlp.ku.edu.np .
It has a simple and userfriendly interface. Some of its currently available features include the possibility of saving the translated output text in Nepali, browsing of the text file to be translated, viewing the translation in Nepali or Romanized Nepali etc. Besides, the web page translation facility and the incorporation of the user feedbacks on the system are planned to be implemented in the near future. Machine Translation System in no sense should be understood as a means to replace human translators but as a useful tool to speed up the translation of large volumes of texts and to solve the inconsistencies in translation abundant in human translation. In this regard, Dobhase is believed to be a positive initiative. The system is targeted to the wide sphere of Nepali audience and should be useful to one and all. The Dobhase system in it's current state should be understood as a means to facilitate communication between English and Nepali producing a gist translation of the source language.
Copyright dobhase@ku.edu.np |