Translation with GF

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App description and download page

Colours

• Green: semantic translation, should be correct. But not necessarily the only correct one.
• Yellow: syntactic translation, should be grammatically correct. But can be very strange in its interpretation and choice of words.
• Light red: chunk translation, probably incorrect. Builds the translation from small pieces.
• Dark red: word-by-word translation, almost certainly incorrect. Builds the translation word by word and returns unknown words verbatim.

The green translations currently come from a tourist phrasebook, which allows you to translate things like "hello" and "how far is the airport from the hotel". But this part can be easily adapted to other uses, such as technical language.

What you can expect

The program is designed to translate anything, just like Google translate and Bing. It has some advantages over them:

• It uses grammars (as opposed to statistics), which makes it more correct in many cases.
• It is open source, which means you can inspect, copy, and modify it in what ever way you want.
• It is light weight, so that you can run it on your own computer and even on a smartphone.
• It gives you linguistic information, such as word inflections.
• It gives you confidence information, warning about translations that it is not so sure about.

However, this is not a mature product but a research prototype. It therefore has some shortcomings:

• It has limited coverage, which means that it misses many words and syntactic constructions.
• It can be clumsy, for instance when it doesn't detect an idiom but translates too literally.
• It can be slow, in particular with long sentences and with some input languages.

Here are some hints to use it in a satisfactory way:

• Start with short sentences (less than ten words), preferably from English or Swedish, to get an idea of the best performance.
• Take a look at the alternative translations, in particular for sentences with low confidence level.
• Send us feedback, and consider contributing to the improvement of the system!

The following table gives a rough idea of what to expect for each language (the speech column refers to the Android app):

How it works

Powered by Grammatical Framework

Slides explaining the translation method:

Get the sources

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