General press letter

Afrikaans

Dear Elsabé

Recently I became involved with the Afrikaans-English 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, which stipulates how grammar is modified during translations.

Where Babelfish is closed, Apertium is open; the development of Apertium is open everyone and it can be used free of charge. Where Babelfish only caters for widely spoken languages, anyone can add a module for a new Apertium translation pair.

Apertium is the first genuine machine translation system which offers support for Afrikaans. This is an exciting development for Afrikaans, since very few languages are well supported by machine translation systems. Apertium is high technology and continued development of the English-Afrikaans module will result in a system that will produce translations on par with that of Babelfish.

An early version of the software can be seen at http://xixona.dlsi.ua.es/testing/index.php?lang=af. Please note that since the English-Afrikaans module is in its early phases and under heavy development, the translation results might sometimes be unexpected.

The Afrikaans-English component was initiated by a Brit, Francis Tyers, who constructed the word list and grammar rules for the Afrikaans part of this component entirely on his own (although he was helped by a few dedicated Afrikaans speakers).

Francis maintains large parts of the Apertium websites:

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

His Wikipedia user page is at http://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebruiker:Francis_Tyers.

Should you be interested in organizing an interview with Francis, he would gladly oblige. He can be reached at francis.tyers@gmail.com.

Regards Wynand Winterbach