  In this paper we present our work on a case study on Statistical Machine
Translation (SMT) and Rule based machine translation (RBMT) for translation
from English to Malayalam and Malayalam to English. One of the motivations of
our study is to make a three way performance comparison, such as, a) SMT and
RBMT b) English to Malayalam SMT and Malayalam to English SMT c) English to
Malayalam RBMT and Malayalam to English RBMT. We describe the development of
English to Malayalam and Malayalam to English baseline phrase based SMT system
and the evaluation of its performance compared against the RBMT system. Based
on our study the observations are: a) SMT systems outperform RBMT systems, b)
In the case of SMT, English - Malayalam systems perform better than that of
Malayalam - English systems, c) In the case RBMT, Malayalam to English systems
are performing better than English to Malayalam systems. Based on our
evaluations and detailed error analysis, we describe the requirements of
incorporating morphological processing into the SMT to improve the accuracy of
translation.
