Nominal Transfer from Tamil to Hindi

Transfer Grammar is an integral component of a Rule based Machine Translation system. In this paper, we describe a subset of the transfer grammar developed for Tamil to Hindi Machine Translation system, i.e., the transfer of nominal constructions from Tamil to Hindi. Nominal constructions in Tamil, which is an agglutinative language, take multiple suffixes which may be case markers or other suffixes. These are expressed as case markers in Hindi. Further, the case systems in the two languages are not in direct correspondence. This paper is based on the analysis of how the different attributes of Tamil nominal constructions could be transferred into Hindi in a machine translation system.