# Towards Machine Translation for the Kurdish Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.06041 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06041/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Language and Speech Technology for Central Kurdish Varieties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01983/) (2024)
- [SoUnD Framework: Analyzing (So)cial Representation in (Un)structured (D)ata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17259/) (2023)
- [Beyond Arabic: Software for Perso-Arabic Script Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11406/) (2023)
- [Script Normalization for Unconventional Writing of Under-Resourced Languages in Bilingual Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16407/) (2023)
- [Hunspell for Sorani Kurdish Spell Checking and Morphological Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06374/) (2021)
- [Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04703/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine translation is the task of translating texts from one language to another using computers. It has been one of the major tasks in natural language processing and computational linguistics and has been motivating to facilitate human communication. Kurdish, an Indo-European language, has received little attention in this realm due to the language being less-resourced. Therefore, in this paper, we are addressing the main issues in creating a machine translation system for the Kurdish language, with a focus on the Sorani dialect. We describe the available scarce parallel data suitable for training a neural machine translation model for Sorani Kurdish-English translation. We also discuss some of the major challenges in Kurdish language translation and demonstrate how fundamental text processing tasks, such as tokenization, can improve translation performance.