MOLTO Multilingual Phrasebook

Aarne Ranta

History

26 March 2010. Version 0.1: Eng, Fin, Fre, Ron; dedicated minibar UI.
28 March. Version 0.2: Swe, Ita; cat Action; small phrases.

Want to contribute? You can add missing words by using the morphological paradigms. The words are added to the WordsL.gf files for each language L. Then recompile the phrasebook by make. All this of course in the source directory, which you can obtain by GF Darcs.

Purpose

This phrasebook is a programme for translating touristic phrases between 15 European languages:

Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish

It is implemented by using the GF programming language (Grammatical Framework). It is the first demo for the MOLTO project (Multilingual On-Line Translation).

The phrasebook has the following requirements:

high quality: reliable translations
translation from any language to any other ones
runnable in web browsers
runnable on mobile phones (also off-line: forthcoming for Android phones)
easily extensible by new words (forthcoming: semi-automatic extensions by users)

The phrasebook is available as open-source software, licensed under GNU LGPL. The source code resides in code.haskell.org/gf/examples/phrasebook/

Current status (28 March 2010):

available in English, Finnish, French, Italian, Romanian, Swedish
very small coverage
works on web browsers calling a server
web service not yet released, but preliminarily available here

Points illustrated

The use of resource grammars and functors.

Compile-time transfer: especially, in Action in Words.

Quasi-incremental translation: many basic types are also used as phrases.

Disambiguation, esp. by the parameters in Roles.

Files

Sentences: general syntactic structures implementable by functor. Concrete syntax via SencencesI.

Words: words and predicates, typically language-dependent. Separate concrete syntaxes.

Greetings: idiomatic phrases, string-based. Separate concrete syntaxes.

Phrasebook: the top module putting everything together. Separate concrete syntaxes.

Resource Roles: parameter types Politeness, Gender

Interface DiffPhrasebook: the (so far small) interface for Sentences.

To Do

Text-based translation interface.

Access to disambiguation grammars in the interface.

The remaining 10 languages

Extract/construct lexica for

food stuff
languages
places

Connection to Google translate, for fall-back and for comparison

Feedback facility in the UI.