General press letter

Afrikaans

Dear _______

Recently I became involved with the ______ component of a machine translation system named Apertium.

Like the famed Babelfish (http://babelfish.altavista.com), Apertium does much more than word-for-word translations. It uses a sophisticated rule based system to change the grammar from the source language in the translation to the grammar of the target language.

While Babelfish and the technology it relies on is closed, Apertium is open. The development of Apertium is open to anyone and it can be used free of charge. Babelfish only caters for widely spoken languages, but the openness of Apertium enables anyone to add support for many minority and lesser-used languages.

Apertium is the first genuine machine translation system which offers support for ____. This is impressive given how few languages are well supported by machine translation systems. Apertium is sophisticated technology and continued development of the _____ module will result in a system that will produce translations on par with, or better than that of Babelfish.

An early version of the software can be seen at _____. Please note that since the _____ module is in its early phases and under heavy development, the translation results might sometimes be unexpected.

The _____ component was initiated by _____, who constructed the word list and grammar rules for the _____ part of this component.

You can find further information on the following two web sites:

• apertium.org is the public site,
• http://xixona.dlsi.ua.es/wiki/ is the wiki website for Apertium developers.

Regards __________