Dear Ian, > Mr. Forcada, > Please call me Mikel... > Thank you. I am not sure that I would not have the technical skills required > to initiate such a project, but I have fairly good organizational and > linguistic skills to contribute to coordination of such a project. That's excellent news. > My brother > Mark Shaw is also a Linux expert and has developed his own Linux > distribution. > Which one? > He could help in this project and has fairly extensive contacts throughout > the > world with programmers. Our project has also capable programmers and linguists that could help. I am indeed sending a copy of this message to our mailing list, [email protected], so that the Apertium community is informed of your intentions and to see if someone out there is also able to lend a hand. > What is your protocol in developing language pairing? > There are many ways in which languages are paired, depending on the data available. In the case of en-ia or es-ia, we already have rather extensive es and en dictionaries. Structural transfer rules for es-ia would be rather easy to write, and those for en-ia could be based in those we already have for en-ca or en-es. One would have to build complete monolingual dictionaries for Interlingua, and also bilingual es-ia or en-ia dictionaries. If you wanted translation from ia, then one would have to train a part-of-speech tagger for ia.
> How would we be able to work with you to put this on the Apertium platform? I can sign you up as developers in our Sourceforge platform, and you can start working on the language pair there. I think initially the new pairs go to some kind of incubator and then to the trunk. Can anyone on the list help us on what would be the protocol? Tu pote leger anque http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium_New_Language_Pair_HOWTO > I > am very interested in pursuing this dialogue. > We also lie around in the #apertium channel at irc.freenode.net. If you don't have an IRC client, you can always use http://webchat.freenode.net to connect. > If I may, I would like to share with you the reason that the development of > an > Interlingua translator could be important. If you are not familiar with > Interlingua, I would suggest that you would first read the Interlingua entry > in > wikipedia. > I am. In facto, io instrue "computatores en traduction" in le Universitate de Alacant et io a usate interlingua in exemplos alcune vices. Exemplo in catalan: http://www.dlsi.ua.es/~mlf/iat/0102iatexpp.pdf > Here, we are talking about a constructed language in use for fifty years, but > still with relatively few users. The linguists who designed this language had > the goal of creating an auxiliary language which could be easily understood > with very minimal learning and in some cases no prior study by speakers of > Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Galician, Asturian, Valenciano, Ladino > and Latin and with only basic study by speakers of French, English and > Rumanian. [Back to English] Indeed, it is completely transparent to me when I read it. So maybe even if it weren't valid as a regular all-purpose auxiliary language, it would be great for many technological applications in a western-european/american context. [snip] > My idea is that if an Interlingua-English translation program on Apertium > could be developed, then we could organize the several thousand Interlingua > enthusiasts to systematically do the following to create a very large body of > literature in this constructed language over the next two years. > El problema principal serea que le textos generate per le traductor automatic deberea esser corregite ('post-editate'). > - Use the URL translation function in Apertium to translate the top 100,000 > articles in Wikipedia. There are currently just over 5,000 wikipedia articles > in Interlingua. I estimate that a volunteer with a good knowledge of > Interlingua could process the URL translation and do the proofreading for one > article an hour. Depende del longitude del articulo! > We could probably work through the World Interlingua Union to > find up to one thousand volunteers to do this. At the same time, we would try > to engage Wikipedia in a project whereby new contributors could be offered a > short on-line Interlingua course to learn the language sufficiently to then > use > themselves the translation tool to make an Interlingua version of their new > contributions, once they have finalized them in their original language. The > concept would be to render their articles into a language that in short order > up to one billion readers could understand immediately or otherwise simply > with the help of a cursor-over translator plug-in in their web browser. > Ille sona multo ambitiose! > Please correct me if I am wrong, but if the Interlingua-English pairing were > done, then it would be possible to use existing English pairing with other > languages to create translation capacities from all your other Apertium > languages into Interlingua. Ille no es directe, sed es plus facile que comenciar de zero. > If this is the case, wikipedia contributors > drafting in these languages could then turned out an Interlingua version of > their article in about an hour. This version could then be proofread by > Interlingua wikipedia volunteers. > > This approach would also encourage wikipedia contributors to write their > articles first in their own language instead of English and would speed up > and > make wikipeda more accessible to the greater number of people who would like > to contribute to wikipedia, but may feel that writing in their own language > would reach too small an audience or that people in their language group > already know the information. > [snip] Multe gratias. Nos seque in contacto. Salute Mikel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Apertium-stuff mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/apertium-stuff
