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.”