On 03/30/2011 05:11 AM, Jimmy O'Regan wrote: > On 30 March 2011 05:42, Mikel Forcada<[email protected]> wrote: >> Hi, >> Second, I would like to make an English to Latin translator, but I am >> not fluent in Latin yet. >> >> Being fluent is not absolutely necessary; it helps, but in the initial steps >> of the development of a new language pair is not needed. What is needed is >> an ability to integrate information and resources you have about the >> languages into rules and dictionaries, and a good command of the formats in >> which Apertium data are written. >> >> By the way, you should first look for any free/open-source resources with >> GPL compatible licenses that you can use to avoid building everything from >> scratch. >> > > I did some work on starting a Latin to Spanish translator a while ago, > and was mostly working with Latin-English resources; I should have a > list of them lying around. > >> By the way, why English to Latin? I can see more applications for Latin to >> English! >> > > Latin to English would be more useful, but less feasible for transfer. > Inflectional languages need something like LALR, instead of LRLM, > otherwise you have to duplicate every noun phrase rule to be more > explicite about gender, number, and case, which is a lot of work, and > potentially error-prone. > > That's not to say that English to Latin would be /easy/ - far from it. > This would be an extremely challenging language pair even for an > experienced Apertium developer, particularly with only three months to > work on it. For an inexperienced developer, I would recommend that you > choose another pair of languages - languages that are related, and > similar.
You should consider getting permission from William Whitaker to use his large Latin dictionary and database of grammatical forms as a starting point for conversion to Apertium. If you get permission, I can share some perl scripts I've written which read his data and produce a Palm Markup Language dictionary file including inflected forms for verbs and nouns which could serve as examples of how to use his data. http://users.erols.com/whitaker/words.htm Cheers! --Mark ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Create and publish websites with WebMatrix Use the most popular FREE web apps or write code yourself; WebMatrix provides all the features you need to develop and publish your website. http://p.sf.net/sfu/ms-webmatrix-sf _______________________________________________ Apertium-stuff mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/apertium-stuff
