French / English Translation

by Sharon Ulery

Purpose

computational linguistics to serve students of French or English & those

who only know one of these translate French to English and English to French

well enough to be understandable Even a less than perfect translation is useful

for basic understanding for students to check their writing

Scope

Iterative form Baseline- word-for-word translation Expected- subject-verb-object form Ideal- all grammatical utterances

Similar Projects

Various levels of sophistication Web-based free automatic translation Software packages for profit Human translation

Theory NLP techniques

Rules- based Not robust Grammatical v. ungrammatical utterances What it does, it does correctly Easier to code

Statistical analysis Robust How people really talk Dependant on corpus More sophisticated, harder to code

Algorithms

Java French v. English versions transToFrench() and transToEnglish() conjugate() other grammar rules

determine conjugation adjective placement determine person of subject determine part of speech

Testing

Structural testing Single user (me) Ongoing After each new method After making

improvements to existing methods

Checks that algorithms work as expected

Random testing Multiple users Periodically Later in development

process Catches what structural

testing misses Shows if new

algorithms are needed

Current Results

Word-for-word translation Verb conjugation from infinitive Recognizes subject pronouns Mechanics

Capitalization Punctuation and misspellings

Example (ETF): “I ask a question.” --> “JE demande un question.”

Example (FTE): “Je demander un question.” --> “I ask a question.”