[Attempto] Attempto and my Translation Framework

[Patrick Forkin]

email to:  attempto at lists.ifi.uzh.ch.
email from: Patrick Forkin <pm4kin at gmx.de>
date: Tuesday July 5 2011
subject: Attempto and my Translation Framework

Hallo!

My project goal was to build a translation framework for translating my own texts written in English into German.
A related goal was to develop the concept on the basis of a "workspace" created with a text editor and no programming.
The framework has now reached a stage that will allow me to publish a first e-Book on it.
The framework using the OpenOffice Writer as the editor and DBEdit as its database tool has the following process steps:

 1. Separation of English sentences into their sentence-parts and input to DBEdit.
 2. Resequence of the sentence-parts to meet German grammar needs.
 3. Transformation, structural or lexical to meet German grammar needs.
 4. Translation into German.

Any document I translate goes through the above steps sentence by sentence and is thus stored in an accessible translation memory.
Any document I release as an e-Book or PDF is released in both source and target languages and includes a glossary of the sentence parts in both languages.
Any translation is checked using the DudenKorrektor product.

Before the year-end I will have released version 2 of the framework based on the use of a translation dictionary.
This will have a basic size of two thousand words for communication and approaching one thousand topic words and finally some five hundred words describing process steps.
It will be a fully tagged dictionary down to the level of declensions.
It is designed to give English words German word-role-tags to allow accurate translation.
The dictionary will have some twenty thousand plus entries.

In parallel to the above I have designed a second framework which is to be published.
It is how to write correct English text and uses a notation database I have designed.

Both frameworks used together form a base for writing and researching in two languages.
They were used in the creation of a Personal Knowledge Management Application for my writing projects.
It will also result in an e-Book publication

What I believe that, I would like to do with Attempto ACE are the following tasks.

1. Use it for a rules system base for grammar, particularly sentence-parts transformation.
2. Use it as a parser basis to parse English sentences and
3. Re-sequence the sentence parts according to German grammar rules.
4. Create a rules base for transformation.

The guidance I might hope for from the members is to indicate whether what I am considering is realistic or illusory.

Given that it is realisable then there are other interesting possibilities, down the route of an IDE

I envisage being able to build an application understandable as a workspace application with certain steps in the process being executed as command one-liners. these will be the steps using a rule base.

There are almost one hundred process steps which could be used in the "one-liner" automations.

I am not a programmer but I write and have some ability to think and describe what I do.

I have always been irritated by the development of programming languages using words or terms that have no links to natural language.

In parallel with what I have described here I am working on a variant of the process based on the use of BasicEnglish.

What I have avoided in the above brief description is how the transformation of sentence-parts into a German form is conducted.
My framework for this is today somewhat primitive and almost haphazard based on an inadequate knowledge of the German writing style.
I have a very simple rules database, but no adequate means of linking to the stored translated memory.
I feel that Attempto ACE could possibly be a route.
What would interest me to know is whether or not Attempto Experts have  links to related projects with similar aspirations to mine, with which I might take contact.

That perhaps is sufficient to describe what I set out to say.

I hope that a dialogue might or can ensue.

The above was the basis of an email I sent to Norbert E. Fuchs who replied as follows.

Hello Patrick

Sorry to react to your message only today. I just returned from vacation.

Concerning your plans

And now to what I would like to do with Attempto ACE.

I would like first to use it for the final level of the dictionary namely the process step words.
The next goal is to describe the steps to perform the framework process steps and build a bridge to Prolog.

I envisage being able to build an application understandable as a workspace application with certain steps in the process being executed as command one-liners. these will be the steps using a rule base.

One thing that struck me

Any document I translate goes through the above steps sentence by sentence and is thus stored in a re-accessible translation memory.

How about anaphoric references between sentences?

Best regards.

Norbert E. Fuchs
Department of Informatics & Institute of Computational Linguistics
University of Zurich
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