A Multilingual Translation System for Enhancing Agricultural e-Extension Services Delivery

Abstract

Agricultural extension is the application of new knowledge and scientific research findings to agricultural practices through farmer education. As a result, agricultural extension agents or workers are people from government research institutes who educate or pass on information to farmers on how to use the new knowledge and scientific research findings. However, the conventional method of communicating the agricultural research outputs or findings to farmers through only face-to-face meeting has many challenges such as geographic dispersion between farmers and extension workers, poor communication capacity, poor transportation facilities, bad roads, inadequate funding and dialectical problems, which create great problems to effective communication of agricultural information to farmers. Furthermore, this mode cannot adequately handle urgent (time bound) information that should circulate within the farming populace. In this paper, a multilingual translation system was developed to enhance agricultural e-extension services delivery. The system employs a serial integration of rule-based and statistical machine translation techniques to translate agricultural information or scientific research findings from the extension workers in English (source language) into farmer’s registered native or preferred language. Four (4) target languages were considered, which include Arabic, Hausa, Ibo and Yoruba. The system was implemented using Per Hypertext Processor (PHP) language version 5.3.5 and Structured Query Language (MySQL) version 5.0.2. The system integration test shows 65% accuracy in translating research outputs in English to farmer’s registered native language. It is therefore recommended that the implemented system be adopted for its efficiency and accessibility in enhancing agricultural e-extension services delivery.