Indirect contribution guide

Many people come to us with a question like "I'm not a programmer/linguist/whatever. Is there any way I can contribute?". This document is intended to show how you can make an "indirect" contribution, by documenting language resources, helping us to build bilingual test sets, translating, promoting, etc.

About This Tutorial

This tutorial will teach you:

• How to creating contrastive analyses.
• How to catalog resources.
• How to convert dictionaries.
• How to translate.
• How to help "Apertium" in other ways .

Create contrastive analyses

What you must do.

The contrastive analyses is most difficult work about translating in "Apertium".
Contrastive analyses is difference between two languages.
Your task is to make sentences in the first language and translating to the other.
You must also give English translation.

You must put it like:

• (First language abbreviation) First language. → Second language. :: English translation.

Examples:

• (ru) Чашка большая. → Чашата е голямата. :: The cup is big.
• (el) Τι γίνεσαι? → как си? :: How are you?
• (bg) Вера се оглежда в огледалото. → Вера смотрит на себя в зеркало. :: Vera is looking at herself in the mirror.

You must translate:

1. Simple syntax
   • Copula
   • Reported speech
   • Clitic placement
2. Pronouns
   • Personal
   • Demonstrative
   • Relative
   • Possesive
   • Reflexive
   • Interrogative
3. Nouns
   • General
   • Indefinite and definite forms
   • 1 Noun phrases
   • Indefinite (a, some)
   • Definite (the)
   • Demonstrative (this, that)
   • Quantified (a few, no, all)
4. Numerals
   • Cardinal
   • Ordinal
5. Adjective
   • Comparative
   • Superlative
6. Adverbs
7. Verbs
   • To be
   • General
   • Indicative mood
     • Present tense
     • Imperfect tense
     • Aorist tense
     • Perfect tense
     • Pluperfect tense
     • Future tense
   • Conditional mood
   • Imperative mood
8. Questions

If you want you can also add

1. Interjections
2. Punctuation marks

You can find an example here:
For Bulgarian and Russian.[1]
For Bulgarian and Greek.[2]

1. http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Bulgarian_and_Russian/Pending_tests
2. http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Bulgarian_and_Greek/Pending_tests

How can you do it?

It is only easy if you only know the both languages.
If you don't know them it is good idea to read this.
One of the languages must be native to you or you must know it very well.
I will give you some tips, that you can help you with your work.