History

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

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

abstract Sentences: general syntactic structures implementable by functor

• concrete by functor SencencesI

abstract Words: words and predicates, typically language-dependent

• concrete separate

abstract Greetings: idiomatic phrases, strings with role dependence

• concrete separate

abstract Phrasebook: put everything together

• concrete separate

resource Roles: param 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.