{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,12,24]],"date-time":"2025-12-24T12:21:28Z","timestamp":1766578888656,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":34,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"1","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2025,2,10]],"date-time":"2025-02-10T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1739145600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Informatics"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Kreol Morisien is a vibrant and expressive language that reflects the multicultural heritage of Mauritius. There are different versions of Kreol languages. While Kreol Morisien is spoken in Mauritius, Kreol Rodrige is spoken only in Rodrigues, and they are distinct languages. Being spoken by only about 1.5 million speakers in the world, Kreol Morisien falls in the category of under-resourced languages. Initially, Kreol Morisien lacked a formalised writing system, with many people using different spellings for the same words. The first step towards standardisation of writing Kreol Morisien was after the publication of the Kreol Morisien orthography in 2011 and Kreol Morisien grammar in 2012 by the Kreol Morisien Academy. Kreol Morisien obtained a national position in the year 2012 when it was introduced in educational organisations. This was a major breakthrough for Kreol Morisien to be recognised as a national language on the same level as English, French, and other oriental languages. By providing a means for Kreol Morisien speakers to connect with others, a translation system will help to preserve and strengthen the identity of the language and its speakers in an increasingly globalized world. The aim of this paper is to develop a translation system for Kreol Morisien and English. Thus, a dataset consisting of 50,000 parallel Kreol Morisien and English sentences was created, where 48,000 sentence pairs were used to train the models, while 1000 sentences were used for evaluation and another 1000 sentences were used for testing. Several machine translation systems such as statistical machine translation, open-source neural machine translation, a Transformer model with attention mechanism, and Marian machine translation are trained and evaluated. Our best model, using MarianMT, achieved a BLEU score of 0.62 for the translation of English to Kreol Morisien and a BLEU score of 0.58 for the translation of Kreol Morisien into English. To our knowledge, these are the highest BLEU scores that are available in the literature for this language pair. A high-quality translation tool for Kreol Morisien will facilitate its integration into digital platforms. This will make previously inaccessible knowledge more accessible, as the information can now be translated into the mother tongue of most Mauritians with reasonable accuracy.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/informatics12010016","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,2,10]],"date-time":"2025-02-10T04:44:03Z","timestamp":1739162643000},"page":"16","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["Automatic Translation Between Kreol Morisien and English Using the Marian Machine Translation Framework"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"12","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1506-5101","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Zaheenah Beebee Jameela","family":"Boodeea","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Faculty of Information, Communication and Digital Technologies, University of Mauritius, Moka 80837, Mauritius"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7077-8681","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Sameerchand","family":"Pudaruth","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"ICT Department, Faculty of Information, Communication and Digital Technologies, University of Mauritius, Moka 80837, Mauritius"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2903-1519","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Nitish","family":"Chooramun","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science and Digital Technologies, School of Architecture, Computing and Engineering, University of East London, London E16 2RD, UK"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-4077-0611","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Aneerav","family":"Sukhoo","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Central Information Systems Division, Ministry of Information Technology, Communication and Innovation, Port Louis 11302, Mauritius"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,2,10]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"101566","DOI":"10.1016\/j.csl.2023.101566","article-title":"Towards better Chinese-centric neural machine translation for low-resource languages","volume":"84","author":"Li","year":"2024","journal-title":"Comput. Speech Lang."},{"key":"ref_2","unstructured":"Savage, C. (2024, September 19). The Importance of Mother Tongue in Education0000000000 2019. Available online: https:\/\/ie-today.co.uk\/people-policy-politics\/the-importance-of-mother-tongue-in-education\/#:~:text=Language%20and%20mother%20tongue%20also,sense%20of%20wellbeing%20and%20confidence."},{"key":"ref_3","first-page":"15","article-title":"Bilingual children\u2019s mother tongue: Why is it important for education?","volume":"7","author":"Cummins","year":"2001","journal-title":"Int. Small Bus. J."},{"key":"ref_4","unstructured":"Le Mauricien (2024, September 19). Introducing Kreol Morisien in Parliament. Available online: https:\/\/www.lemauricien.com\/le-mauricien\/introducing-kreol-morisien-in-parliament\/370057\/."},{"key":"ref_5","unstructured":"(2024, September 17). Mauritius National Assembly, Available online: https:\/\/mauritiusassembly.govmu.org\/SitePages\/Index.aspx."},{"key":"ref_6","unstructured":"(2024, September 19). Govmu.org. Updated Edition of Report on Spelling and Grammatical Rules of Creole Language of the Republic of Mauritius Launched, Available online: https:\/\/www.govmu.org\/EN\/newsgov\/SitePages\/Updated-edition-of-Report-on-spelling-and-grammatical-rules-of-Creole-Language-of-the-Republic-of-Mauritius-la.aspx."},{"key":"ref_7","unstructured":"L\u2019Express Akademi Kreol Repiblik Moris: Ignition Delays (2024, September 10). L\u2019Express 19 February 2021. Available online: https:\/\/www.lexpress.mu\/article\/389161\/akademi-kreol-repiblik-moris-retards-lallumage."},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"968","DOI":"10.1017\/S0010417507000825","article-title":"Creole publics: Language, cultural citizenship, and the spread of the nation in Mauritius","volume":"49","author":"Eisenlohr","year":"2007","journal-title":"Comp. Stud. Soc. Hist."},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"245","DOI":"10.1177\/0963947007079103","article-title":"The contribution of creative writing to the standardization of Mauritian Creole","volume":"16","author":"Mooneeram","year":"2007","journal-title":"Lang. Lit."},{"key":"ref_10","unstructured":"(2024, September 19). Le Mauricien [Sylvio Michel, President of the Fraternal Greens: \u201cLess Misery, If the Americans Had Recruited the Chagossians\u201d]. Le Mauricien, 1 September 2018. Available online: https:\/\/www.lemauricien.com\/le-mauricien\/sylvio-michel-president-des-verts-fraternels-moins-de-misere-si-les-americains-avaient-recrute-les-chagossiens\/228630\/."},{"key":"ref_11","unstructured":"(2024, September 16). The Alfa King Diary. Rodrigues: Advocacy for Educational Tourism. Available online: https:\/\/alfaking4fr.wordpress.com\/category\/actualites\/."},{"key":"ref_12","first-page":"36","article-title":"A Review of the Recognition of Kreol as a National Language in Mauritius","volume":"1","author":"Betchoo","year":"2019","journal-title":"Asian J. Basic Sci. Res."},{"key":"ref_13","unstructured":"Hookoomsing, V. (2024, September 19). Grafi-Larmoni: A Harmonized Writing System for the Mauritian Creole Language. Available online: https:\/\/z-lib.id\/book\/a-harmonized-writing-system-for-the-mauritian-creo."},{"key":"ref_14","unstructured":"Harmon, J.D. (2014). Heritage Language & Identity Construction: A Critical Ethnography of Kreol Morisien as an Optional Language in Primary Education Within the Republic of Mauritius. [Ph.D. Thesis, University of the Western Cape]."},{"key":"ref_15","unstructured":"Miller, A. (2015). Kreol in Mauritian Schools: Mother Tongue Language Education and Public. [Ph.D. Thesis, Yale University]."},{"key":"ref_16","unstructured":"(2024, September 19). L\u2019Express. Morisian Kreol at School Certificate: Cambridge International no Longer Needed. Available online: https:\/\/lexpress.mu\/s\/article\/393615\/kreol-morisien-au-school-certificate-plus-besoin-cambridge-international."},{"key":"ref_17","unstructured":"(2024, September 24). Le Matinal School Certificate: The Success Pass Is 73.71%. Available online: https:\/\/english.lematinal.media\/school-certificate-the-success-pass-is-73-71\/."},{"key":"ref_18","first-page":"1","article-title":"Morisia: A Neural Machine Translation System to Translate between Kreol Morisien and English","volume":"23","author":"Pudaruth","year":"2021","journal-title":"InTRAlinea Online Transl. J."},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Dabre, R., and Sukhoo, A. (2022). MorisienMT: A Dataset for Mauritian Creole Machine Translation. arXiv.","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/2022.findings-aacl.3"},{"key":"ref_20","first-page":"4976","article-title":"A neural machine translation system for Kreol Repiblik Moris and English","volume":"13","author":"Pudaruth","year":"2024","journal-title":"IAES Int. J. Artif. Intell."},{"key":"ref_21","unstructured":"Carpooran, A. (2019). Diksioner Morisien, Editions Le Printemps. [3rd ed.]."},{"key":"ref_22","unstructured":"Yang, S., Wang, Y., and Chu, X. (2020). A survey of deep learning techniques for neural machine translation. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Klein, G., Kim, Y., Deng, Y., Senellart, J., and Rush, A.M. (2017). Opennmt: Open-source toolkit for neural machine translation. arXiv.","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/P17-4012"},{"key":"ref_24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Nidhi, R., and Singh, T. (2019, January 21\u201322). SMT Algorithms for Indian Languages\u2014A Case Study of Moses and MT Hub for English-Maithili Language Pair. Proceedings of the ICETIT 2019, Delhi, India.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-030-30577-2_23"},{"key":"ref_25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"171","DOI":"10.1016\/j.neucom.2018.01.007","article-title":"Fine-grained attention mechanism for neural machine translation","volume":"284","author":"Choi","year":"2018","journal-title":"Neurocomputing"},{"key":"ref_26","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"143","DOI":"10.1016\/j.eng.2021.03.023","article-title":"Progress in machine translation","volume":"18","author":"Wang","year":"2022","journal-title":"Engineering"},{"key":"ref_27","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Jiang, H., Zhao, S., Fang, D., Zhang, C., and Duan, J.A. (2021). Comparative Study on Transformer versus Sequence to Sequence in Machine Translation. Modern Industrial IoT, Big Data and Supply Chain, Springer.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-981-33-6141-6_10"},{"key":"ref_28","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Junczys-Dowmunt, M., Grundkiewicz, R., Dwojak, T., Hoang, H., Heafield, K., Neckermann, T., Seide, F., Germann, U., Aji, A.F., and Bogoychev, N. (2018). Marian: Fast neural machine translation in C++. arXiv.","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/P18-4020"},{"key":"ref_29","unstructured":"Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A.N., Kaiser, \u0141., and Polosukhin, I. (2017, January 4\u20139). Attention is all you need. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Long Beach, CA, USA."},{"key":"ref_30","unstructured":"Sutskever, I., Vinyals, O., and Le, Q.V. (2014). Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_31","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Kudo, T. (2018). Sentencepiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for neural text processing. arXiv.","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/D18-2012"},{"key":"ref_32","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3955","DOI":"10.1007\/s40747-024-01373-8","article-title":"Leveraging pre-trained language models for code generation","volume":"10","author":"Soliman","year":"2024","journal-title":"Complex Intell. Syst."},{"key":"ref_33","unstructured":"Khandelwal, U., Fan, A., Jurafsky, D., Zettlemoyer, L., and Lewis, M. (2020). Nearest neighbor machine translation. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_34","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Agarwal, A., and Lavie, A. (2008, January 19). Meteor, m-bleu and m-ter: Evaluation metrics for high-correlation with human rankings of machine translation output. Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, Columbus, OH, USA.","DOI":"10.3115\/1626394.1626406"}],"container-title":["Informatics"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2227-9709\/12\/1\/16\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,9]],"date-time":"2025-10-09T16:30:10Z","timestamp":1760027410000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2227-9709\/12\/1\/16"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2025,2,10]]},"references-count":34,"journal-issue":{"issue":"1","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,3]]}},"alternative-id":["informatics12010016"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/informatics12010016","relation":{},"ISSN":["2227-9709"],"issn-type":[{"type":"electronic","value":"2227-9709"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2025,2,10]]}}}