Grfro3d/proposal apertium cat-srd and ita-srd

Contact Information

Name: Gianfranco Fronteddu

Location: Casteddu, Sardigna

E-mail: gfro3d@gmail.com

IRC: gianfranco

SourceForge: gfro3d

Telegram: gianfro4moros

Skype: gianfranco.fronteddu88

Why is it you are interested in machine translation?

I’m a Translation student and have always been fascinated by Computational Linguistics during my University studies. We have approached to this field of Linguistics through the courses “Theory and techniques of translating” and “Applied linguistics” at the University of Cagliari. As a support to the translation, the MT are divided into two groups: one is MT which is used for "assimilation" —the use of machine translation to understand the general meaning of the text in foreign language. The other approach is instead that of "dissemination" in which the MT is an intermediate step in the production of a document in the TL, which will be published. To facilitate this process, it is usual to adopt the controlled languages, namely to establish the phrases with structures not too complex. An important aspect is free/opensource, which allows using for any purpose software and examining it and then adapting it for the creation of new applications. Therefore, open-source software can be redistributed and improved. Open-source RBMT is, then, very useful for language, thanks to the creation of morphological data such as dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, grammars and rules and structural transfer files. RBMT systems consist of an engine (coding and decoding), data (linguistic data) and support tools to convert data and make them compatible with the engine. Even if most RBMT systems are private and are born for commercial purposes, open-source RBMT offer the possibility of being able to take advantage of the engine MT, but also to be able to intervene on the code to modify and change the rules. Finally, the advantages of creating a RBMT system are above all the increase of linguistic resources: information collected for the development of a machine translation is easily reusable for other projects and related technologies. In this way, MT can truly become a good support especially for minorised languages in danger of extinction.