ELL: On software for Basque and other lgs ("support")

[Matthew McDaniel]

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			 Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 13:45:49 +0000
			 From: Matthew McDaniel <akha at loxinfo.co.th>
			 Organization: The Akha Heritage Foundation
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			 Subject: Re: ELL: On software for Basque and other
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			 Trond:

			 Thankyou very much for your information which I have
			 filed away for down the
			 line.

			 Matthew




			 Trond Trosterud wrote:

			 > >Does anyone know how much work it would take to
                            make an auto translator
			    > >that could
			    > >take an Akha text and make it into english or
                            english into Akha?
			    > >
			    > >Matthew McDaniel
			    >
			    > Very, very much work.
			    >
			    > An auto translator is in any case one of the
                            last outcomes of a long range
			    > of products of such a work, all of which are
                            important to akha (and
			    > conversley for other lgs) as well. You need:
			    >
			    > A good grammar of akha, or, conversely, a good
                            understanding of what is
			    > going on in akha.
			    >
			    > A large, large corpus of akha texts
			    >
			    > Good dictionaries in both directions, and
                            terminological work to give good
			    > matches for terms in both lgs.
			    >
			    > The corpora and dictionaries must also be
                            available electronically, and in
			    > formats appropriate for further software
			    >
			    > Then you need morphological an syntactic parsers
                            for Akha (and for English,
			    > but they are available). The morphology part
                            will probably not be too hard
			    > (see below), but it must be done. As for syntax
                            I do not know, it depends
			    > upon whether the major functional categories are
                            uniquely identified or
			    > whether you have ambigous constructions
                            depending upon context for parsing.
			    >
> As a next step, I would look for existing translation programs between
> English and lgs typologically similar to akha, and take as much advice as
> possible from them.
>
> A good guess would be the genetically related Burmese, with some 21 mill
> speakers and a country to back it up; it probably has some more resources
> than you do. Another inspiration source is Japanese, not related, but with
> a similar grammar. The writing systems are different, of course, but this
> is a minor problem as compared to a task as complex as auto translation.
>
> At least Burmese is SOV with no grammatical agreement, and postpositions to
> mark grammatical relations (much like Japanese, thus), so there you are. If
> Akha is similar, the grammatical structure seems quite straightforward. The
> only obstacle is that the Burmese word order in my reference grammar was
> described as "free" (except for the verb-finalness), this "freedom" is
> quite probable governed by complicated context-sensitive rules that an auto
> translator may have difficulties in mimicking. A possible product may thus
> give monotonic phrases as a result.
>
> What you need now is a couple of computational linguists who are curious
> about akha and willing to try something out, and/or a commersial
> translation software company that may be interested in extending its
> coverage to akha as well, provided someone does the basic work for them
> (assuming that the commersial marked is small).
>
> But do not forget the ground work!! You need large, good dictionaries to
> cover even the simplest texts (this letter, for instance).
>
> Trond
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> Trond Trosterud                                     t +47 7764 4763
> Finsk institutt, Det humanistiske fakultet          h +47 7767 3639
> N-9037 Universitetet i Troms. Noreg                f +47 7764 4239
> Trond.Trosterud at hum.uit.no  http://www2.isl.uit.no/trond/index.html
> Test string-please ignore:..s*.-...S.*-..3?...2.-........
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Matthew McDaniel
The Akha Heritage Foundation
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Maesai, Chiangrai, 57130
Thailand
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