Indonesian-to-Javanese Machine Translation

Abstract

Javanese is a multi-level language; it comprises four speech levels used to convey local politeness. However, the negative tendency is detected regarding the use of Javanese speech levels among teenagers. They prefer to use the Indonesian national language (bahasa Indonesia, BI) because of the Javanese speech level complexity. A combination of statistical and memory-based machine translation is designed by the authors to help Javanese youths in translating between both languages. The evaluation shows that translating speech levels of Javanese to Indonesian is more accurate than translating in the opposite direction, as revealed by the average accuracy (A) of 0.83 for Javanese-Indonesian translation and 0.68 for the other direction. Index Terms—Indonesian, Javanese speech levels, machine translation.