Meaning of symbols * @ and dieze after a translation

En français

After a translation with Apertium, several words, translated or not, can be preceded by one of the 3 symbol: * @ or #

The purpose of this page is to tell you the meaning of these symbols and the reason of their appearance.

Meaning of the * symbol

The * character appears before a word when this word could not be analyzed. There can be two main causes for this:

1. the word that follows the * is not in the morphological dictionary of the source language,
2. the word that follows the * is provided in the morphological dictionary of the source language, but an error on paradigm prevent the surface form of the word to be found.

In both cases, this kind of error can result from a misspelling of the word to translate, but not only.

Meaning of the @ symbol

The @ character appears before a word when this word could not be translated. The word has been recognized in the morphological dictionary of the source language, but there is a problem in the bilingual dictionary. There can also be two main causes for this:

1. the word to be translated is not in the bilingual dictionary,
2. the word to be translated is in the bilingual dictionary, but a directional restriction <e r="LR"> or <e r="RL"> does not permit the translation in the good direction and there is no available alternative translation. This problem can possibly come from a wrong choice between "LR" and "RL".

Meaning of the # symbol

The # character appears before a word when this word has been translated, but there is something not sure about the surface form this word must take in the target language. In these conditions, the translated word is presented as a lemma preceded by #. There can also be several causes for this:

1. the translated word is not in the morphological dictionary of the target language,
2. the translated word is in the morphological dictionary of the target language, but it is necessary to add information in the bilingual dictionary (as for example the gender of words in each language), so that the transfer from a language to the other works correctly. If you add words to an existing dictionary, you can get help using syntax of other bilingual dictionary entries about words using the same paradigms (in the morphological dictionary) to deal with this kind of problem.
3. the transfer step for this word need to change several tags, that is not done or not done correctly.

See also

• Apertium stream format