Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0044/00442.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 6KB | 135 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00442}
$Pretitle{266}
$Title{Bolivia
Aymara, a Bridge Language to Computer Translation}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Peter McFarren}
$Affiliation{Embassy of Bolivia, Washington DC}
$Subject{computer
aymara
de
guzman
language
rojas
english
atamiri
french
says}
$Date{1989}
$Log{}
Country:     Bolivia
Book:        The Cultural Guide of Bolivia
Author:      Peter McFarren
Affiliation: Embassy of Bolivia, Washington DC
Date:        1989

Aymara, a Bridge Language to Computer Translation

     Aymara, a language spoken by 2,5 million Indians in one of the poorest
regions of the Americas, has been discovered by the computer and might soon
become one of man's most useful languages.

     A Bolivian mathematician, Ivan Guzman de Rojas, has devised a system of
translating by computer, using Aymara as a "bridge" to convert texts from any
one of five Western languages into all the others, simultaneously.

     His achievement, a breakthrough in the fledgling art of machine
translation, is a vindication for Aymara's ancient founders. According, to
some historians, wise men constructed the language from scratch by logical,
premeditated design as early as 4,000 years ago.

     The Aymaras were later subjugated by Quechua-speaking Incas, who
conquered much of the Andean highlands before being conquered themselves by
the Spaniards in the 16th century. Both ruling forces tried to silence the
guttural-sounding Aymara tongue, but it survives today along the shores of
Lake Titicaca, among the peasant farmers and llama herders of Bolivia and
Peru.

     "The irony is that the language of a people who are mostly illiterate
and have lived under centuries of cultural oppression could, in a couple of
years, be used in sophisticated computers throughout the world," Guzman de
Rojas says.

     The 55-year-old mathematician and engineer is the creator of Atamiri, a
computer program that reduces the simple syntactical rules of Aymara to a
string of algebraic symbols. Atamiri means "interpreter" in the Indian
language.

     These symbols form an algebraic "bridge language" at the core of the
computer logic. The computer can translate a text through this code into
English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish at a speed of 250 words per
minute.

     Sitting at a computer terminal, Guzman de Rojas demonstrates by typing a
tricky Spanish sentence: "La mujer que vino ayer tomo vino". Less than a
second after he pushes a button, five translations flash on the screen and
roll off a printer. The English reads: "The woman who came yesterday drank
wine."

     The system is remarkable, according to U.S. and Canadian experts, not
only for its speed and versatility, but its ability to sort out ambiguities.
Other systems, they say, cannot distinguish between uses of the word
"vino" -- which can mean "came" or "wine" -- without an awkward modification
of the computer logic.

     "It is done very simply," said Miguel Brazao, a research supervisor at
Wang, a major computer firm in Lowell, Massachussetts. "Many systems have
failed because their approach is so complex. They try to include vocabulary
and grammar in the central program."

     Over the past decade, researchers have developed a computer system that
translates English to French, but not French to English. Another turns Russian
into French. A third goes from German to English. None has advanced into
large-scale commercial use.

     "Atamiri is 10 times faster than any of the others," said Bill Page, a
computer specialist at the International Research center in Ottawa, Canada.

     The center published Guzman de Rojas' first study of Atamiri's potential
in 1980, and UNESCO and the Organization of American States have been
supporting his work. He also has a contract with the Canal Zone Commission to
translate technical manuals.

     A large man with gray streaks in his black hair, Guzman de Rojas knows
the Aymara written language inside out but doesn't speak it as fluently as
English, German or his native Spanish.

     For five years, he has honed his system on borrowed equipment in a rented
La Paz office with a view of the Aymaras' Andean Altiplano homeland--a setting
popularized by his late father, Cecilio Guzman de Rojas, Bolivia's best-known
20th century painter.

     Aymara is ideal for the computer, he says, because it's so simple.
Ludovico Bertonio, an Italian Jesuit missionary who produced the first
Aymara - Spanish dictionary in 1610, wrote of "the genius of the creators of
this language", which permits neither irregular verbs not exceptions to its
few grammatical rules.

     "It is a language that was well thought out," Guzman de Rojas says. "The
strength of the language enabled the Aymaras to preserve their cultural
identity through centuries of conquest."

     The creator of Atamiri hopes to expand its vocabulary from the current
24,000 words for English and Spanish and 16,000 for Portuguese, Dutch, French,
German and Italian to at least 100,000 words. Then, he says, it will be
possible to translate prosaic texts such as newspaper articles with about 90
percent accuracy. Literacy translations would come later, but human
participation will be always necessary.

     Though Atamiri's universal potential is great--new languages can be
added without touching the basic program--Guzman de Rojas is more excited
about using it to promote literacy at home, in Aymara.

     Curiously, Aymara hardly exists in writing. A slow reawakening in Bolivia
to the country's Indian roots has allowed Aymara radio programming to flourish
in the past 20 years, but aside from religious pamphlets, few texts exist.

     Guzman de Rojas is now also developing the Yatiri information retrieval
system that works in conjunction with Atamiri. It is a multi-lingual
intelligent automatic indexing program. His work has been written up by the
Associated Press, Newsweek, New York Times and Time Magazine. "What is
difficult for people in Europe and the U.S. to accept is that the Third World
is able to contribute with sophisticated software in such an important field
as computers," Guzman de Rojas says.