Issue 1 The International Journal of Localisation

Abstract In this paper the development of computational morphological analysers for six South African Bantu languages is discussed. Due to the rich agglutinating morphological structures of these languages, the morphological processing poses particular challenges. These challenges are of an orthographical, a morphological as well as of a lexical nature. The current status of the project is reported on, firstly in terms of the development of prototypes of morphological analysers for the various languages, and secondly in terms of the development of standardised XML machine-readable lexicons for the South African Bantu languages, based on an appropriate general data model. 22 Introduction It is well known that localisation initiatives are supported by language translation, and in particular machine assisted and machine translation. However, there is much more to machine translation than meets the eye, especially in highly agglutinating languages such as the Bantu languages. The importance of morphological analysis is recognised as a basic enabling application for further kinds of natural language processing (NLP), including part-of-speech tagging, parsing, semantic analysis and information retrieval, and also for high-level applications such as spelling checking, lexicography, language teaching, text-tospeech systems, question answering and last but not least machine translation