2nd International Conference on Machine Learning and Computer Science (IMLCS'2013) May 6-7, 2013 Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)
Proverb Treatment in Malay-English
Machine Translation
Khirulnizam Abd. Rahman and Norita Mohd. Norwawi
Abstract – Machine translation is a process by which computer
software is used to translate a text from one natural language, in this
case Malay, to another, English. They are normally short, generally
known sentence of the folk which contains wisdom, truth, morals,
and traditional views in a metaphorical, fixed and memorisable form
and which is handed down from generation to generation. Although
proverb do beautifies Malay literature, this brings challenges to
machine translation since proverb cannot be translated literally, rather
logically. This paper is to propose a research on proverb treatment in
Malay-English machine translation. The treatment process started by
identifying the Malay proverbs using the pattern matching approach.
After the identification, the proverb will be translated into the
meaning in English. To avoid literal (direct) translation a lookup
table of the Malay proverb and the actual meaning in English has
been prepared. There is another challenge, the ambiguity of the
proverb meaning (there are Malay proverbs with several different
meanings). To resolve this ambiguous issue, the possibility theory
will be implemented with the help of the one of the WordNet feature,
the semantic labeling.
Keywords-- idiom treatment , machine translation, Malay-English
machine translation, pattern matching, possibility theory
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Proverbs in Malay-English Machine Translation
M ACHINE translation (MT) is sometimes defined as
automated translation or machine aided translation. It is
a process by which computer software is used to
translate a text from one natural language, Malay, to another,
English [27]. The study of Malay language in machine
translation has been a serious topic since 1984 with the
establishment of Unit Terjemahan Melalui Komputer (UTMK)
in USM [5]. Malay language in the sense of this research is
bahasa Melayu which is the standard first language in
Malaysia. Although Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei languages
shares the common roots of Austronesian family, the research
is focusing into Malaysian Malay language.
Proverbs (peribahasa) in Malay language are beautiful
elements to deliver advices, Malay teachings, moral values
and comparison through metaphoric phrases [26].
Khirulnizam Abd. Rahman and Norita Mohd. Norwawi are with Universiti
Sains Islam Malaysia Nilai, Negeri Sembilan, MALAYSIA email:
khirulnizam@gmail.com
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They are normally short, generally known sentence of the
folk which contains wisdom, truth, morals, and traditional
views in a metaphorical, fixed and memorisable form and
which is handed down from generation to generation [12].
Although proverbs do beautifies Malay literature, however
this brings challenges to machine translation since proverb
cannot be translated literally, rather logically [7].
B. Brief Description of Malay Proverbs
Peribahasa or Malay proverb is a group of words in a fixed
order that has a particular meaning that is different from the
meanings of each word understood on its own [1]. There are
four categories of Malay proverbs [1], which are simpulan
bahasa, perumpamaan, bidalan and pepatah.
Simpulan bahasa – normally consist of two words (sometimes
three). The literal meaning of the word combination is
different than the actual meaning of the ‘simpulan bahasa’.
Example: Langkah kanan; literally means right footstep, yet
the actual meaning is lucky.
Perumpamaan – phrases started with seolah-olah, ibarat,
bak, seperti, macam, bagai or laksana.
Example: bagaikan pinang dibelah dua; literally means like
betel nut split apart evenly, yet the actual meaning is
compatible / equally beautiful and handsome for a pair of just
married bride and bridegroom.
Pepatah – proverb that contains advices or teachings.
Example: Adat berperang, yang kalah jadi abu, menang
jadi arang; literally means in war, loser become ashes, winner
become coal, yet the actual meaning is in war, the defeated
and the winner are both losers.
Bidalan – phrase (pepatah) started with jangan, biar or
ingat.
Example: Kalau kail panjang sejengkal, lautan dalam
jangan diduga; literally means if you have a short hook, do not
attempt to fish in the deep sea, yet the actual meaning is if you
have little knowledge, do not dare to dream big.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
A. Multi Words Expressions (MWE)
MWE is combination of several words to form another
meaning. As in other languages, Malay also contains a lot of
MWE. Although some MWEs can be isolated in the
tokenization process, and then analysed as a single cluster,
most of them cannot [3].
 2nd International Conference on Machine Learning and Computer Science (IMLCS'2013) May 6-7, 2013 Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)
According to Tatabahasa Dewan [16], the basic sentence in
Malay can be categorised into four basic structures (Table I).
TABLE I
FOUR CATEGORIES OF BASIC MALAY SENTENCES
Malay basic sentence Combination of Phrases
category
1 Noun Phrase + Noun Phrase
2 Noun Phrase + Verb Phrase
3 Noun Phrase + Adjective Phrase
4 Noun Phrase + Prepositional Phrase
Source: Tatabahasa Dewan Edisi Ketiga, 2008 [16]
Aiti Aw et al [2] in their research realized the important of
Noun Phrases in Malay sentence structure decided to study
this issue. They proposed a translation approach where they
make use of parallel bilingual corpus to obtain a large set of
bilingual terms and then use them to train a statistical engine.
There’s another research by Rais et. al. [17] indexing the
Malay MWE using combination of query translation approach
and weighting schemes. The researchers did mention about
dictionary is crucial in multiword detection.
B. Why proverbs are another type of MWE that are more
difficult to translate?
Proverb and idioms are a part of MWE. The only problem
with proverbs and idioms in MT is they cannot be translated
literally, rather logically [7]. The translation machine needs to
know the definite meaning of the proverbs.
C. Challenges in Malay proverbs automated detection.
These are several challenges that need to be consider in the
automated detection of Malay proverbs.
a) Word with affixes – Example: “Kembang sayap” =
“Mengembangkan sayap”.
b) Another word in between (stopword) Example:
“berpijak di bumi nyata” or sometimes “berpijak di
bumi yang nyata” which means “do not day-dreaming”.
c) Different proverb having the same meaning.
Example: “Baik budi”, “baik hati” which means kind-
hearted. Another example: "bintang hati", "buah
hati", "mahkota hati", "rangkai hati", "tajuk mahkota",
"tangkai hati", "tangkai kalbu", "bintang terang" which
means beloved.
D. Ambiguous meaning of Malay proverb.
There are Malay proverbs can have more than one meaning
[18]. Examples of ambiguous Malay proverbs are.
a) “mata air” which means 1) lover, or 2) underground ater
resource.
b) “orang putih” which means 1) pious man, or 2)
European people.
c) “air muka” – 1) face 2) pride
d) bawa diri - 1) running away 2) sulking 3) being
independent.
e) Bagai cicak makan kapur - meaning 1) ashamed because
of his own offense. 2) pleased.
f)Ada air adalah ikan - meaning: 1) there must be people
in a country 2) fortune is everywhere
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III. PROBLEM STATEMENT
The most challenging issue in interpreting natural language
texts is the ambiguity problem [15], [10]. Proverbs are one
part of the ambiguity issues. Proverbs normally come with
fixed sequence of words; however the meaning is not based on
the words directly [1]. Since proverb is translated logically,
the machine translation algorithm needs to know the semantic
(real meaning) of the phrases. On top of these issues, certain
Malay proverbs have ambiguous meaning (more than one
meaning) which the solution has not been mention in existing
proverbs treatment [20], [7], [4].
IV. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
This study is to answer the following research questions;
a) Is there any workable algorithm that can be
implemented to detect Malay proverbs?
b) Since the nature of several Malay proverbs that has
ambiguity in the meaning, can this be solved using the
existing algorithm?
c) Will the semantic analysis improve the Malay proverb
translation?
V. THE RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
The aim of this research is to propose a novel approach to
proverb classification using Naïve Bayesian approach and
translation into English using combination of dictionary
mapping and semantic labeling.
The objectives are:
a) To analyze the pattern of Malay proverbs.
b) To develop an algorithm to extract proverbs from Malay
texts.
c) To develop an algorithm of translating the Malay idioms
into English by providing the actual (logical) meaning
(not literal meaning).
d) To model the semantic analysis in order to define
ambiguous meaning of the Malay proverbs.
e) To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
VI. THE SCOPE OF RESEARCH
The research is capable of detecting and defining the meaning
of proverb in Malay text. Proverbs may appear in modern
Malay literature such as in novel, short stories or blogs.
VII. THE RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS
The research’s major contributions are;
a) To develop an algorithm to identify proverb in Malay
text.
b) To develop an algorithm that can translate Malay
proverb by providing the right meaning of the
proverbs that has ambiguous meaning.
VIII. PREVIOUS WORKS
These are several works by the previous researchers that
have done remarkable jobs in solving the issue of
proverbs/idioms detection and translation. These researches
studied proverbs in many different languages such as Hindi,
Punjabi, Malay, Germany, English and Italian.
 2nd International Conference on Machine Learning and Computer Science (IMLCS'2013) May 6-7, 2013 Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)

Brahmaleen et. al. [4] suggested a method in identifying

proverbs in Hindi text and translate them into Punjabi. The
machine has a dictionary to map the Hindi proverb and the
equivalent proverb in Punjabi. The illustration of the workflow
of the said system is available in Figure 1.

Fig. 2 METIS II translation flow Source: Dmitra, 2010 [7]

IX. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Fig. 1 Hindi to Punjabi proverb automated translation
Source: Brahmaleen et. al., 2010 [4]
Noah and Ismail [20] found out that Malay proverb can be
detected using Naïve Bayesian model. The experiment
suggested that the multinomial model shows slightly better
performance as compared to the Multivariate Bernoulli model.
This research suggested stop words removal to enhance the
classification process.
There is another research from ATMA, UKM whereby they
are providing a searchable database of Malay proverbs and
idioms [25]. The application receives a complete or a part of
proverb/idioms, using the SQL pattern matching to search the
list of the proverbs/idioms, and the outputs are all the
proverbs/idioms that similar to the user’s request.
Dmitra [7] studied the METIS II (in Figure 3) translation
engine which capable of translating several languages such as
Dutch, German, Greek and Spanish into English. The pre-
translation process involves tokenization, lemmatization,
tagging and chunker. By using the existing METIS II
facilities, she managed to embed an idioms translation tool for
Germany into English.
The idioms processor comprises of the following three
components;
a) German-English idioms dictionary,
b) German source language corpus of sentences, and
c) Syntactic matching rules.
The dictionary was constructed manually, the German
corpus (containing idioms) assembled from varies prominent
resources such as Europarl [9], sentence examples from the
Web and DWDS [8]. The last component is the German
syntactic matching rules which recognize the syntax of
German idioms either in the form of continuous of
discontinuous.
However, among all the researches mentioned in the
discussion of the previous works, none of them mention about
the treatment to the proverbs that have ambiguous meaning.
The research is an experimental based research whereby
development of the system will be carried out, and evaluated
to validate the performance. The following research processes
are adopted;
Phase 1 : Literature Review (Information Gathering/
Acquisition)
A thorough literature review is conducted related to the area
of research; covering theoretical, conceptual and
developmental aspects. Current research on subject matter is
analysed. The research gap is identified and refined to its
potential venture.
Phase 2: Dictionary of Malay Proverb (and Semantic
Labelling)
Dictionary of Malay Proverb is defined as the main
dictionary used in the system. Suggested dictionary is the
Peribahasa Melayu Kontemporari by Abdullah & Ainon, 2011
[1]. Semantic labelling (tagging) will be done manually to the
list of proverbs that has ambiguous meaning (as suggested in
Wordnet, 2012 [11] and Dmitra [7]).
Phase 3: Design
The design of system is carefully devised to support Malay
proverb detection and translation. Pre-classification will
involve tokenization, stop words removal and stemming. The
proverb detection will be constructed from the pattern
matching. As for the translation, direct dictionary lookup will
be adopted (for proverb with single meaning). To resolve the
ambiguity issue, the possibility theory will be implemented
together with the semantic analysis and semantic labeling as in
WordNet [11].
Phase 4: Development/ Implementation
The proposed system is developed based on the design
phase aforementioned. Appropriate programming languages
are used (suggestion to develop this system as a web-based
application).
Phase 5: Evaluation
The system is tested in terms of its impact on the efficiency
of the proverb classification, and correctness of translation.
The testing dataset will be developed by combining sentences

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 2nd International Conference on Machine Learning and Computer Science (IMLCS'2013) May 6-7, 2013 Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)
that contains Malay proverb appear in Malay novel, short
stories or blogs.
X. EXPECTED FINDINGS
Based on the problems identified, the researcher suggesting
the following framework for Malay proverb treatment for
Malay-English machine translation in Figure 3.
Tokenization is process of separating words and
punctuation. This process provides a list of tokens which
represents separated words and punctuations [7].
Stop words removal is a process of enlisting all the words
that are considered not important (meaningless). In this case
stop words are such as yang, itu, macam, seperti, bagai,
laksana, ibarat, umpama, ini, begitu, begini and etc. This
process will produce better accuracy [22] in text classification.
Stemming is a process of finding the root of a word through
removing the prefixes and postfixes. Word such as membawa
is rooted from bawa which appear in membawa diri (or
sometimes used as bawa diri). Stemming will provides more
chances of finding the proverb in the dictionary.
Malay proverbs detection - by using the pattern matching
approach, this process will identify Malay proverbs appearing
in the text.
Proverb Semantic Analysis – in the case of proverb with
ambiguous meaning, the semantic tagger will be analyzed.
Fig. 3 Expected Findings - A framework to classify Malay proverb
and translate it into the actual meaning in English
XI. CONCLUSIONS
Proverb translation is challenging because the ambiguity
and the logical definition. As highlighted in the previous
discussion, there are Malay proverbs with ambiguous
meaning. This research propose the following steps for
proverb detection and translation of Malay text; tokenization,
stemming, proverb detection and translation.
By developing the prototype of the system, the researcher
could be able to minimize the confusion in defining proverb
through automated translation. It is hoped that this approach
will have great impact on the advancement of proverb
treatment in Machine Translation system.
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