ftp.cs.arizona.edu/ftp.cs.arizona.edu.tar/ftp.cs.arizona.edu/icon/newsgrp/group93a.txt/000087_icon-group-sender _Mon Mar 15 20:28:35 1993.msg

Internet Message Format | 1993-04-21 | 2KB

Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Wed, 17 Mar 1993 04:53:28 MST
Date: 15 Mar 93 20:28:35 GMT
From: nevada.edu!jimi!snooks.isri.unlv.edu![e-mail]  (Kevin Grover)
Organization: Information Science Research Institute (UNLV-ISRI)
Subject: Re: Language translators
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In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Tanis Half-Elven) writes:
) From: [e-mail] (Tanis Half-Elven)
) Subject: Language translators
) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 93 21:42:22 PST
) Organization: Alternative Collegiate Computing Association
)
)     Hi,  I was wondering if anyone out there had done any work
) with writing a program that would take input of a string and translate
) it to another language, such as englsh to spanish, or vice versa,
) or any language for that matter.  If so, how did you go about
) doing it....suggestions are welcome.  It is an idea i've had for
) a long time, but never had the ambition to work on :)
)

This is a non-trivial thing.  Human languages have many exception.  To
truley do an adequate job, the translater needs to have a "common
sense" database.  I remember reading about a project to do this.  It
involved a very large knowledge base.  The semantic analyser translated
sentences of the source language into a language independant
representation (i.e. meaning based) which could then be translated
into another language based on meaning.  This has the advantage over
straight word translators of not getting erroneous translations of
slang, etc.

There are several commercial programs the go between English, and
German, Spanish, or Italian, but, they're not perfect.  (i.e. mostly
based on "word for word" or "phrase for phrase" translation.

--
- kev, [e-mail]