Statistical machine translation (SMT) which was the dominant paradigm in machine translation (MT) research for nearly three decades has recently been superseded by the end-to-end deep learning approaches to MT. Although deep neural models produce state-of-the-art results in many translation tasks, they are found to under-perform on resource-poor scenarios. Despite some success, none of the present-day benchmarks that have tried to overcome this problem can be regarded as a universal solution to the problem of translation of many low-resource languages. In this work, we investigate the performance of phrase-based SMT (PB-SMT) and neural MT (NMT) on a rarely-tested low-resource language-pair, English-to-Tamil, taking a specialised data domain (software localisation) into consideration. In particular, we produce rankings of our MT systems via a social media platform-based human evaluation scheme, and demonstrate our findings in the low-resource domain-specific text translation task.

Statistical machine translation (SMT) was the state-of-the-art in machine translation (MT) research for more than two decades, but has since been superseded by neural MT (NMT). Despite producing state-of-the-art results in many translation tasks, neural models underperform in resource-poor scenarios. Despite some success, none of the present-day benchmarks that have tried to overcome this problem can be regarded as a universal solution to the problem of translation of many low-resource languages. In this work, we investigate the performance of phrase-based SMT (PB-SMT) and NMT on two rarely-tested low-resource language-pairs, English-to-Tamil and Hindi-to-Tamil, taking a specialised data domain (software localisation) into consideration. This paper demonstrates our findings including the identification of several issues of the current neural approaches to low-resource domain-specific text translation.