SiTa is here to help translate government documents

One of the issues with government announcements has often been the lack of document availability in English, Sinhala, and Tamil across the board. Even in 2022, the lack of a consistent policy over offering important public information in all three languages is problematic, to say the least. With the aim of tackling this very problem, the University of Moratuwa is introducing SiTa, a computer-assisted translation system.

SiTa was developed by the National Languages Processing Center at the University of Moratuwa with the assistance of AHEAD from the Ministry of Education. The system is targeted at government official documents to be translated between the three languages including circulars, reports, and letters. SiTa utilizes a neural machine translation engine to translate documents, followed by a check from a professional translator. Afterward, a reviewer will finalize the documents before sending them through. As one might have guessed, the idea here is to improve accuracy.

What you should know about the SiTa

However, it should be noted that this isn’t a complete error-proof solution. In fact, SiTa’s terms and conditions specifically state the translation is done on a “best effort” basis and that it’s not responsible for any “inadvertent errors in translation.” It further mentions that the service doesn’t claim any responsibility for “ambiguities or nuances” in the source document to always be interpreted in the translation.

But how much will SiTa cost the government should it opt to utilize the service? The process dictates official requests be sent via email and SiTa would only quote if the requested translations are accepted. As of now, a translation from one language to another is priced at LKR 5 per word along with a minimum of LKR 1,200 per request. For translations to two languages, the only change is the LKR 10 pricing per word. As per the announcement, the charges are in accordance with the Public Administration services.

Any government entity looking to use the service would need to complete the application and email it to [email protected]. According to SiTa Project Director Prof. Gihan Dias, the service hopes to translate and review documents up to 360 words by the next day. Further, submissions should be in Unicode .docx format and only in text.

In any case, it will be interesting SiTa in action as a viable means of bridging the communication gaps of official government documentation.