Translating Handwritten Bushman Texts

Williams, Kyle and Hussein Suleman (2010) Translating Handwritten Bushman Texts. In Proceedings ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2010, Gold Coast, Australia .

Abstract

The Bleek and Lloyd Collection is a collection of artefacts documenting the life and language of the Bushman people of southern Africa in the 19th century. Included in this collection is a handwritten dictionary that contains English words and their corresponding |xam Bushman language translations. This dictionary allows for the manual translation of |xam words that appear in the notebooks of the Bleek and Lloyd collection. This, however, is not practical due to the size of the dictionary, which contains over 14000 entries. To solve this problem a content-based image retrieval system was built that allows for the selection of a |xam word from a notebook and returns matching words from the dictionary. The system shows promise with some search keys returning relevant results.