We describe the development of a bidirectional rule-based machine translation system between Indonesian and Malaysian (id-ms), two closely related Austronesian languages natively spoken by approximately 35 million people. The system is based on the re-use of free and publicly available resources, such as the Apertium machine translation platform and Wikipedia articles.
We also present our approaches to overcome the data scarcity problems in both languages by exploiting the morphology similarities between the two.