The potential of swetra—A multilanguage MT system

Abstract

One may indicate the potentials of an MT system by stating what text genres it can process, e.g., weather reports and technical manuals. This approach is practical, but misleading, unless domain knowledge is highly integrated in the system. Another way to indicate which fragments of language the system can process is to state its grammatical potentials, or more formally, which languages the grammars of the system can generate. This approach is more technical and less understandable to the layman (customer), but it is less misleading, since it stresses the point that the fragments which can be translated by the grammars of a system need not necessarily coincide exactly with any particular genre. Generally, the syntactic and lexical rules of an MT system allow it to translate many sentences other than those belonging to a certain genre. On the other hand it probably cannot translate all the sentences of a particular genre. Swetra is a multilanguage MT system defined by the potentials of a formal grammar (standard referent grammar) and not by reference to a genre. Successful translation of sentences can be guaranteed if they are within a specified syntactic format based on a specified lexicon. The paper discusses the consequences of this approach (Grammatically Restricted Machine Translation, GRMT) and describes the limits set by a standard choice of grammatical rules for sentences and clauses, noun phrases, verb phrases, sentence adverbials, etc. Such rules have been set up for English, Swedish and Russian, mainly on the basis of familiarity (frequency) and computer efficiency, but restricting the grammar and making it suitable for several languages poses many problems for optimization. Sample texts—newspaper reports—illustrate the type of text that can be translated with reasonable success among Russian, English and Swedish.