Morphophonological and Syntactic Foundations for Tarifit-English Translation

Description

This study addresses a persistent challenge: translating the synthetic, morphologically rich Tarifit language into analytical English. Drawing on a corpus of authentic speech collected from social media and fieldwork in northern Morocco, it systematically examines the verbal and nominal patterns (stem allomorphy, circumfix negation, object clitic fusion, and sandhi processes) that routinely complicate translation.

Rather than treating these features as obstacles, the work demonstrates their underlying systematicity and provides clear, step-by-step parsing techniques. These methods enable translators and language technologists to reliably unpack complex single-word Tarifit forms into their multi-word English equivalents. The analysis also directly speaks to the 42% morphological error rate observed in Tarifit machine translation, offering formalizable linguistic knowledge that can support future NLP development and translator training. A practical resource for anyone working with Amazigh languages, translation studies, or low-resource language technology.