General press letter

Afrikaans

Dear _______

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 to change the grammar from the source language in the translation to the grammar of the target language.

While Babelfish is closed, Apertium is open. The development of Apertium is open 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 languages.

Apertium is the first genuine machine translation system which offers support for Afrikaans. This is impressive given how few languages are well supported by machine translation systems. Apertium is sophisticated 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 Francis Tyers, who constructed the word list and grammar rules for the Afrikaans part of this component.

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.

Regards __________