Purpose

This phrasebook is a program for translating touristic phrases between the 15 European languages included in the MOLTO project (Multilingual On-Line Translation):

• Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish

It is implemented by using the GF programming language (Grammatical Framework). It is the first demo for the MOLTO project, released in the third month (by June 2010) but to be updated in the course of the project.

The phrasebook has the following requirements:

• high quality: reliable translations to express yourself in any language
• translation between all pairs of languages
• runnable in web browsers
• runnable on mobile phones (also off-line: forthcoming for Android phones)
• easily extensible by new words (forthcoming: semi-automatic extensions by users)

The phrasebook is available as open-source software, licensed under GNU LGPL. The source code resides in code.haskell.org/gf/examples/phrasebook/

Current status (8 April 2010):

• small coverage in abstract syntax
• reasonable implementations for English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Romanian, Swedish
• almost just cloned for the rest of MOLTO languages
• temporary user interdace
• works on web browsers calling a server
• web service not yet released, but preliminarily available in http://tournesol.cs.chalmers.se/~aarne/phrasebook/phrasebook.html

Points illustrated

Interlingua-based translation.

Incremental parsing.

The use of resource grammars and functors.

Compile-time transfer: especially, in Action in Words.

Quasi-incremental translation: many basic types are also used as phrases.

Disambiguation, esp. of politeness distinctions.

Ontology

The abstract syntax defines the ontology behind the phrasebook. Some explanations can be found in the ontology document, which is produced from the abstract syntax files Sentences.gf and Words.gf by make doc.

Files

Sentences: general syntactic structures implementable in a uniform way. Concrete syntax via the functor SencencesI.

Words: words and predicates, typically language-dependent. Separate concrete syntaxes.

Greetings: idiomatic phrases, string-based. Separate concrete syntaxes.

Phrasebook: the top module putting everything together. Separate concrete syntaxes.

DisambPhrasebook: disambiguation grammars generating feedback phrases if the input language is ambiguous.

Here is the module structure as produced in GF by

    > i -retain DisambPhrasebookEng.gf
    > dg -only=Phrasebook*,Sentences*,Words*,Greetings*,DisambPhrasebookEng
    > ! dot -Tpng _gfdepgraph.dot >pgraph.png

To Do

Improved translation interface

• a to list of languages: either all, or just one
• combined text field/fridge magnet input; filter magnets by started word prefix
• a nicer way to show disambiguation (maybe hidden by default)

Complete the missing words and phrases

Disambiguation grammars for other languages than English

Extend the abstract lexicon in Words by hand or (semi)automatically for

• food stuff
• languages
• places

Link to Google translate, for fall-back and for comparison

Feedback facility in the UI

Customizable distribution: make your own selection of the 2^15 language subsets when downloading the phrasebook to a phone

How to contribute

The basic things "everyone" can do is

• complete missing words in concrete syntaxes
• add new abstract words in Words and greetings in Greetings

The missing concrete syntax entries are added to the WordsL.gf files for each language L. The morphological paradigms of the GF resource library should be used. Actions (prefixed with A, as AWant) are a little more demanding, since they also require syntax constructors. Greetings (prefixed with G) are pure strings.

Some explanations can be found in the implementation document, which is produced from the concrete syntax files SentencesI.gf and WordsEng.gf by make doc.

Here are the steps to follow for contributors:

1. Make sure you have the latest sources from GF Darcs, using darcs pull.
2. Also make sure that you have compiled the library by make present in gf/lib/src/.
3. Work in the directory gf/examples/phrasebook/.
4. After you've finished your contribution, recompile the phrasebook by make pgf.
5. Save your changes in darcs record . (in the phrasebook subdirectory).
6. Make a patch file with darcs send -o my_phrasebook_patch, which you can send to GF maintainers.
7. (Recommended:) Test the phrasebook on your local server:
   1. Go to gf/src/server/ and follow the instructions in the project Wiki.
   2. Make sure that Phrasebook.pgf is available to you GF server (see project wiki).
   3. Launch lighttpd (see project wiki).
   4. How you can open gf/examples/phrasebook/www/phrasebook.html and use your phrasebook!

• Don't delete anything! But you are free to correct incorrect forms.
• Don't change the module structure!
• Don't compromise quality to gain coverage: non multa sed multum!