FYI, just saw this item from Engineering News:
http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article.php?a_id=108492

This may not be news to many/most(?) of you. Whenever I see an article in
any field that claims a "new generation" technology my first question (with
no disrespect intended) is how does it really compare to other "new
generation" (or old) technologies?

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net
PanAfriL10n.org


Views > Columnists > Hitech Briefs - Karel Smrcka
Finnish firm develops machine translation technology
Published: 18 May 07 - 0:00

Sunda Systems, of Finland, has developed a new-generation
machine-translation technology that can be used to develop efficient machine
translators for any pair of languages you care to name. The Sunda MT
Workbench provides a set of tools for building high-quality machine
translators for even small languages that have been bypassed so far by major
vendors.

Sunda Systems applies a number of key technologies to guarantee the
suitability of its Sunda MT Workbench for a wide variety of languages and
ensure that it can be used for any pair of languages, and contains all the
tools needed for building a machine translator from scratch.

Dependency theory, for example, is employed to handle sentence structure, as
structures that can be quite different on the surface in different languages
can actually be quite close when projected on this abstract level.

The company has also pioneered the principle of parallel translation. Among
the most important tangible theoretical and practical benefits of this
approach is efficiency as a common processor can translate thousands of
sentences in a second. This principle also keeps linguistic and
computational issues strictly separate, and enables linguists to concentrate
on linguistic issues and see the effects of a linguistic change on the
system in only a few seconds.

The Sunda MT Workbench also includes tools for quality control and teamwork.

A high-quality English-Finnish translator built, using the Sunda MT
Workbench, is already in wide use and has yielded good results.

To minimise the reworking needed for different languages, the Sunda approach
is based on the principle of late commitment, which means that the
processing of source- language sentences is conditioned to a specific target
language only when it is imperative - not before.

This means that a major portion of the source-language processing developed
for one pair of languages can be reused in a translator for another target
language. SMOOTHING THE PATH FOR DEVELOPERS

In addition to good translation quality, Sunda Systems has also prioritised
the need for its technology and the applications built around it to be
efficient, user-friendly, adaptable and robust.

Sunda's core translation engine can be embedded easily in external systems
using standard programming interfaces and Internet protocols, for example,
and runs seamlessly under most commonly used operating systems.

The engine also has built-in support for common file formats, such as RTM
and HTML - and documents written in these formats retain their formats in
translation.

Language-independent end- user applications are already avail-able to
translate home pages in a Web browser, translate formatted documents, and
translate general text content in desktop applications.

Coupon No.: EN0108492


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