Re: About making a translator

On Monday, October 25, 2004, at 10:37 , taliesin the storyteller wrote:

> * AczJ5@aol.com said on 2004-10-25 21:27:26 +0200
>>
>>    Do  any  of  you  know  how  to  make  a  translator  for usage on the
>>    computer?   The  only computer language I know is mIRC scripting and
>> I
>>    don't  even know enough of that language to make a translator that can
>>    translate effectively with correct grammar.
>
> If you find out how, remember to apply for a patent. You could make
> trillions...
>
>
> t. (guess what my masters thesis will roughly be about...)
That's what my master's thesis was about  :)

But I haven't made trillions because as Simon Richard Clarkstone wrote on
Monday, October 25, 2004, at 09:46:

> This is a highly non-trivial task.
That is no understatement! It is not something that can be treated just in
an email. If you are really serious about automatic machine translation
you will need to do quite a bit of serious reading.

> You can get a computer to do
> reasonable glosses/interlinears, but natural language is very difficult.
>  Unless your lang has a very close correspondence to English (or
> whichever your destination lang is, since you may be making a family of
> conlangs) then translations will still look terrible.
They will - in many cases the 'translation' is likely to be almost
meaningless.

> OTOH, learning to program is a useful skill, even if it only gives you a
> new way to think about grammar for conlanging.
ABSOLUTELY!! Besides, programming is fun   :)

> Python
> <http://www.python.org/> would likely be a good place to start, though
> (depending on your age) you could also take a Comp Sci course at
> university.  There is a possibility that there exists somewhere a
> programming language (or a library of code) specifically for writing
> translators, but it is difficult to search for such a thing, as
> "translator" is also a more general programming term.
The programming language I used for machine translation was Prolog. It is
my favorite language. I haven't tried Python, but i have heard its virtues
extolled,

> Once you (or anyone else) have a bit of programming skill (after several
> years), then you could try writing a BNF notation or some form of
> mathematical-ish specification for your language(s) (easier than for
> natlangs, since it doesn't have the idiom and general irregularity that
> natlangs tend to acquire).
Yes, I agree.

[snip]
> Finally, several free translation sites are linked to from
> <http://babelfish.org/>.
I don't know what these are like - but I was put off babelfish once when i
was feeling lazy and got it to 'translate' a site I'd found in French. The
English it produced was largely unintelligible. It was much easier to
stick with the French (which i can read fairly fluently).

But, as Richard has written & I have discovered from experience, it is a
highly non-trivial task.

Ray
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http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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