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MorphemeAddict@hidden.email wrote:
>
> Rick,
> What is the current state of your translation program? What kind of English
> texts can it translate? Can you input, say, a novel? How does the program
> handle unfamiliar words? What does the output look like?
> Is the program fairly robust at this point, or are there still some major
> problems that have to be solved?
>
It translates only from Ladekwa to English. It can correctly translate
all of the example and drill sentences of the posted lessons. It simply
reads its input from a file or standard input and writes the translation
to a file or standard output:
~/al/src: il2eng --help
Usage: il2eng [options] [infile [outfile]]
Translate Ladekwa sentences in infile (default = standard input)
into English and write the results to outfile (default = standard
output). Options:
-h, --help Print this help message.
-d, --debug Debug mode. Print Ladekwa sentence before and
after transfer. Also print hash statistics.
-p, --print Print constituent tree after parsing each sentence.
I have no intention of writing software to translate from English (or
any other natural language) to Ladekwa, since my only goal is to test
the interlingua. I may, however, write software to translate from
Ladekwa to other natural languages.
Unfamiliar words are usually handled like this:
Input: Dwicumpa pa bopya punke kyu to.
Output: I broke the washing machine with a chair.
Input: Dwicumpa pa bwazyapya punke kyu to.
Output: I broke the ??? with a chair.
Since I have not yet added "bwazyapya" (meaning 'chronometer') to the
translation dictionary, the translator just outputs "???".
The software is fairly robust. Most of the future difficulties will be
dealing with the idiosyncracies of English. For example, special code
had to be written to handle "fawma", since it has different translations
in different contexts.
Regards,
Rick Morneau
http://www.eskimo.com/~ram