raph@tigger.planet.bt.co.uk (Raphael Mankin) (09/08/89)
usenet@cps3xx.UUCP (Usenet file owner) writes: >In article himage@jolnet.ORPK.IL.US (Steve Schwartz) writes: >>I am looking for a program or a utility, that will translate foreign >>language text files to english (particularly french to english). >You're asking for an awful lot! I don't think such a thing exists >except in a very rudimentary form. Natural languages are just too >complex. My guess for this sort of thing would be to contact Wycliff, >the Bible translating people. >However, maybe it exists and I'll be (very) pleasantly suprised. There are naaaatural language translation programs about, they vary from the mammoth to the mini. Systran will handle most European languages and even American. It requires very laaarge, not to say huge, IBM mainframes to run and will cost accordingly.A This is a pure batch system. Coming down a bit there is the Weidner system which runs, I believe, on PDP11sss and other minis. This is not a pure translator, rather it is a program for assisting a human translator. Apoart from these there are SpandAm aand AmSpan, used by the American Health Organisation, to translate between Spanish and American. Tom-Meteo is a Canaaadisn system fro translating weaather reports. ILSAM is a controlled vocabulary system use by, amongs others, Raank Xerox for fully automatic translation of manuals. In general, a fully automatic, high quality translation is not possible. The present state of the art will give you about 50% comprehensibility and you will have to post-edit the program's output. The various interactive systems, such as Weidner, will greatly increase the productivity of a human translator and are probably the best bet at the moment. There is a lot of work going on: translation accounts for about 30% of the total budget of the European Commission - the only larger item is the common agricultural policy. I doubt whether we shall see any significant improvement in automatic translators until their authors give up the notion of sytnax directed translation. Syntactic analysis does not work because natural languages, unlike computer languages, are neither compositional nor referentially transparent. is a machine assisted translation program. -- Raphael Mankin raph@planet.bt.co.uk
elh@caen.engin.umich.edu (2442) (09/14/89)
I would like know if there exist any programs that will pronounce english text? I've seen a program on MAC which does that--It can pronounce any words or read sentences, even foreign names. Sometimes it's different than the dictionary pronuciation, but it's unstandable. How hard is it to do this on the IBM PC? Thanks,
mlord@bmers58.UUCP (Mark Lord) (09/15/89)
In article <45a3c046.8f55@fiero.engin.umich.edu> elh@caen.engin.umich.edu (Ed_Han) writes: >I would like know if there exist any programs that will pronounce english >text? I've seen a program on MAC which does that--It can pronounce any words Yes. On simtel20, look at PD1:<MSDOS.VOICE>TRAN.ARC I have recently acquired this from the LISTSERV thingie, and it works. Sound quality is not the greatest, but pretty good for the primitive speaker interface hardware on a PC. -Mark