RELATED LANGUAGES

         I have made a translation of the text “the belle and the beast”, from french to spanish; these two languages are closely related languages, this are the probles that I have found in the tranlation, which has been made by the program call Translendium.

 

         The first mistake is in the title, Translendium have translate it into spanish as ” la bonita y el animal”, this is totaly wrong, because, the real translation will be ” la bella y la bestia”. Apart from that, I have to mention that he uses the word ” bonita” all the time, and it is totally wrong, as i have said before. There the same problem with other characters like “lumière” which is translated like “luz”, this is wrong, specially because it is a name, so it hasn´t got a translation.

 

        There are other phrases during the text that they are incorrect too, such as, “… persigue a bonita de sus asiduidades pero esconde….”, this phrase hasn’t got any sense, it is totally wrong; the real and the understable translation will be “….el le persigue a bella por sus asiduidades pero ella se esconde…”, there are lots of phrases like that along all teh text.

 

Finally, some words that have different meanings in the text, for example, llave/clave which in french will be “clés“, that can be “llave” or “clave“, butin this case the correct one will be clave, there are other examples such as, chica/hija, ….. 

 

SOURCES:

• ” la bonita y el animal”. Retrieved  the 15 of june 2008, at 21:00, from http://littera.deusto.es/enwiki/index.php/User:ZiortzaVivanco/hlt0708/fres2esen

 

• “la belle et la bête”. Retrieved  the 15 of june 2008, at 21:00, from http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Belle_et_la_B%C3%AAte_%28Disney%29   

 

•  Translendium. Retrieved  the 15 of june 2008, at 21:00, from http://www.translendium.net:8080/home/index.jsp?locale=es

SOME SPECIALIZED TERMS

These are the differences between some specialized terms:

 

• Machine tranlation: sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT, is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another. Translation proper is performed by a computer,even if the human helps by preediting, postediting or answering questions to disambiguate the source text.

 

• Computer-assisted translation: is a form of translation wherein a human translator translates texts using computer software designed to support and facilitate the translation process. Computer-assisted translation is sometimes called machine-assisted, or machine-aided translation.

 

• Multilingual content management: Contains information, including also video clips, audio clips and images.

 

• Translation: is the action of interpretation of teh meaning of a text,and subsequent production of anequivalent text, also called translation, that communicates teh same message in another language. It must take into account constraints that include context, the rules of grammar of the two languages, their writing conventions, and their idioms.

 

SOURCES:

• Machine tranlation (MT). Retrieved in june 8, 2008, 20:00, http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/HLTsurvey/ch8node6.html

 

• Machine translation (MT). Retrieved in june 8, 2008, 20:15,                                                   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation

 

• Computer-assisted translation (CAT). Retrieved in june 8, 2008, 20:30, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_translation

 

• Multilingual content management. Retrieved in june 8, 20:45, http://www.kitsite.com/articles/multilingual-content-management.html

 

• Translatin. Retrieved in june 8, 21:00, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation

 

A translation example by MT systems

         

        I´m going to use an MT system which is called Translendium to make a translation example from spanish into english, I mean, into a less related language and then I’m going to explain the gramatic errors and other errors that the tranlation programmes make. 

 

        As we can see,the first two lines of the spanish version are different in the english version, the programme hasn´t understand very well the spanish version so that the order of the words in the english has been change incorrectly, that´s why it is incorrect and it has no sense.

 

         Apart from that, some words in spanish have more than one meaning in english so in the tranlation appear all of the words, in this case the both words “step/crossing”.

 

       The same happens with the subjects; in spanish sometimes there aren’t subjects so in the translation appear different subjects “its/ his/her/ their…”, maybe because, in spanish, the subject isn’t very clear.

 

Finally, I have to mention other error that appear in the last paragraph, in the spanish version appear “… por una serie de murallas construidas y …” but in the english one the word “…una serie…” is translated into “series” and that is incorrect, because it is not the same thing.

 

RESOURCES:

 

• Translendium programme. http://www.translendium.net:8080/home/index.jsp?locale=es, fecha de la consulta el 11 de mayo del 2008, hora de la consulta las 18:00.

 

• http://littera.deusto.es/enwiki/index.php/User:ZiortzaVivanco/hlt0708/eg1esen, fecha de la consulta el 11 de mayo del 2008, hora de la consulta las 17:30.

 

• http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Muralla_China, fecha de la consulta el 11 de mayo del 2008, hora de la consulta las 17:45.

Characteristics of a translation task according to the FEMTI report

           According to the FEMTI report, characteristics of a translationtask refers to the information flow intended for the output, from the point of view of the human or other thing who receives the translation.

           As the FEMTI report says, there are three characteristics of a translation task; assimilation, dissemination and communication. I´m going to explain a bit all of them:

 

• Assimilation: The ultimate purpose of the assimilation task is to monitor a large volume of texts produced by people outside the organization, in several laguages.

 

• Dissemination: The ultimate purpose of the dissemination task is to deliver to others a translation of documents produced inside the organization.The translation quality required is generally high, but translation speed is usually not a factor.

 

• Communication: The ultimate purpose of the communication task is to support multi-turn dialogues between people who speak different languages. The translation quality must be high enough for painless conversation, despite possible syntactically ill-formed input and idiosyncratic word and format usage.

 

           RESOURCES:

• FEMTI, a Framework for Machine Translation Evaluation in Isle, http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mteval/, fecha de la consulta el 8 de mayo del 2008, hora de la consulta las 18:00.

Research Topics (Q.2)

     Here are some ofthe research topics of three European research centers:

     First of all, The German Language Technology Lab., which themes are elaborated in research, development and commercial projects:

• Exploiting- and automatically extending- ontologies for content processing.
• Tighter integration of shallow and deep techniques in processing.
• Enriching deep processing with statistical methods.
• Combining language checking with structuring tools in document authoring.
• Document indexing for German and English.
• Automatically associating recognize information with related information and thus building up collective knowledge.
• Automatically structuring and visualizing extracted information.
• Processing information encoded in multiple languages, among them Chinese and Japanese.

  

      Secondly, we can mention the projects of The Edinburgh Lnguage Technology Group, which conducts research and development in different areas.

• Combining shallow semantics and domain knowledge.
• Text mining for Biomedicational Content Curation.
• Cross- retail Multi- agent Retail Comparison.
• Smart Qualitative Data: methods and Community Tools for Data Mark-up.
• Machine Learning for Name Entity Recognition.
• Named entity tagging of historical parliamentary proceedings.
• Integrated Models and Tools for Fine- Grained Prosody in Discourse.
• Joint Action Science and Technology.
• AMI consortion projects that are developing technologies for meeting browsing and to assit people participating in meetings from a remote location.
• Study of how pairs collaborate when in planning a group on a map

 

       And finally,  The National Centre for Language, which research areas are the following ones:

• CALL Computer Assisted Language Learning: Integrating CL/NLP/HLT Technology into CALL, CALL for Endangered Languages, CALL for Primary School Environments, CALL for Remedial Learners.
• Corpus Linguistics: Collocation, Contrastive Computational Linguistics, Corpus- based Traslation Studies.
• Machine Translation and Translation Technology: SMT, RBMT, EBMT, TMs, MAT, CAT.
• Treebank- Based Unification Grammar Acquisition: Automatic Feature Structure Annotation Algorithms, Subcategorisation Frame Straction,…
• Semantics: Discourse Representation Theory, Linear- Logic Based Semantics, Computational of Logic Forms from Treebanks, Open- Domain Question Answering Systems.
• Speech Technology: Speaker Characterisation, Audio Classification, Retrieval and Coding, Human Computer Interfaces (HCIs).
• Multilingual Information Retrieval/Extraction.
• Language Evolution.

RESOURCES:

•  The National Centre for language Technology. http://www.computing.dcu.ie/research/nclt/research.html, fecha de la consulta el 14 de marzo del 2008, hora de la consulta 20:00.

 

• The Edinburgh  Language Technology Group. http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/, fecha de la consulta el 14 de marzo del 2008, hora de la consulta 20:15.

 

• The Language Technology Lab. http://www.dfki.de/lt/projects.php, fecha de la consulta el 13 de marzo del 2008, hora de la consulta 19:30.

European Research Centers

There are some European research centers for Human Language Technologies, here are three examples:

• Language Technology Lab., Germany.

           Their objective is the improvement of language technology through novel computational techniques for processing text, speech and knowledge, a deeper understanding of human language and thought, studying the needs of the users and the demands of the market. 

• National Centre for Language Technology, Ireland.

               This centre conducts the research into the processing of Human Language through computers, for example speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation and others.

• Edinburgh Language Technology Group, Scotland, UK.

           Is a research group that has been studying in the area of natural engineering  since the early 1990s.

          They focus on building practical solutions to real problems in text processing.

RESOURCES.

 

• http://www.computing.dcu.ie/research/nclt/, fecha de la consulta el 27 de marzo del 2008, hora de la consulta las 19:20

 

• http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/, fecha de la consulta el 27 de marzo del 2008, hora de la consulta las 19:30

 

• http://www.dfki.de/lt/projects.php, fecha de la consulta el 27 de marzo del 2008, hora de la consulta 20:00

Hans Uszkoreit

Hans Uszkoreits is Proffesor of Computational Linguistics of Saarland University and he also serves as Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) where he heads the DFKI Language Technology Laboratory. Apart from that he is Proffesor of the Computer Science Department.

      He has studied Linguistics and computer science at the Technicl University of Berlin and the University of Texas in Austin. During part of his live he has been working as a research associate in a large machine translation project at the Linguistics Research Center,he also worked as a computer scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International in Menlo Park and in other similar ones.

    Hans is member of lots of academies, such as, permanent member of the International Committee of Computational Linguistics (ICCL) , Member of  the European Academy of Sciences, member  of the Executive Board of the European Network of Language and Speech and more and more.    

      Here are some of the recent publications of this proffesor :

• Uszkoreit, H. (2007) Methods and Applications for Relation Detection. In: Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Conference on Natural Processing and Knowledge Engineering, Beijing, 2007.

•    Uszkoreit, H. F. Xu, W. Liu (2007) Challenges and Solutions of Multilingual and Translingual Information Service Systems , To appear in Proceedings of HCI International 2007, 12TH International Conference on Human- Computer Interaction, Beijing, 2007.

• Busemann, S. and H. Uszkoreit (2004) Predicting the Future: Technology Roadmapping. In: ELSNews, (3) 2004.

         RESOURCES:

• www.dfki.de/it/it-general.php, fecha de la consulta el 27 de marzo del 2008, hora de la consulta las 18:00

 

• http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~hansu/, fecha de la consulta el 27 de marzo del 2008, hora de la consulta las 18:15

 

• http://www.dfki.de/~hansu/LT.pdf, fecha de la consulta el 26 de marzo del 2008, hora de la consulta las 20:00

 

 

DEFINITION OF HUMAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES

     As in wikipedia appears,  natural language processing,  also called human language technologies,  is a subfield of artificial intelligence and linguistics. This studies the problems of automated generation and understanding of natural human languages. Thus, on the one hand the natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into normal- sounding human languages, and on the other hand, natural language understanding systems convert samples of human language into more formal representations which are easier for computer programs to manipulated.

     Another definition is the one that is giving by Hans Uszkoreit in his book “Language Technology A First Overview”. In this book he explains that Language technologies are information technologies that are specialized for dealing with the most complex information medium in our world: human language. Therefore this technologies are also often subsumed under the term Human Language Technology. Whereas speech is the oldest and most natural mode of language communication, complex information and most of human knowledge is maintained and transmitted in written texts.[...]Nevertheless, lnguage technology had to create formal representation systems that link language to concepts and tasks in the real world.

    

   RESOURCES:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Natural_language_processing&oldid=110067975, fecha de la consulta el 27 de marzo del 2008, hora de la consulta las 20:00

 

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_language_technology, fecha de la consulta el 27 de marzo 20:15

ORALIDAD

      La oralidad es una forma comunicativa que va desde el grito de un recién nacido hasta el diálogo generado entre amigos. Existen dos clases de oralidad:

1. ORALIDAD PRIMARIA: se refiere a las culturas que solo la poseen a ella para comunicarse y que permite una activación de la memoria. Las culturas orales tienen un conjunto de conocimientos, hábitos, tradiciones, representaciones, sinbolismos y significaciones que permiten descubrirlas.
2. ORALIDAD SECUNDARIA: son las que manejan culturas avanzadas que tienen escritura. Se ha convertido en el soporte de la memoria.

       Siempre ha sido tema de estudio la relación entre la escritura y la oralidad. Por lo tanto para la siguiente explicación seguimos los estudios de Olson y de Ong.

       Siempre se ha creido que la escritura es uan muestra más de la evolución del hombre camino al conocimiento. Pero si consideramos la escritura como un paso de esa evolución  y celebrarla es a la vez considerar la “oralidad” como inferior, como algo que hay que superar y de ser necesario erradicar.

          Ong dice que “es tiempo de retirar la hipótesis de la cultura escrita” y por eso se ocupa de reformularla . Esta hipótesis de la cultura escrita no es solo la capacidad de leer y escribir de un individuo sino que es más general y se refiere  a la competencia general requerida para tomar parte en una tradición de escritura.

 FACTORES DE LA ORALIDAD

• Lingüístico: Articulación clara de uso preciso de palabras y construcción correcta de oraciones.

• Extralingüístico: Entonación, cdencia, rapidez, ritmo, pausas y volumen de la voz, acompañados de la expresión visual, facial y corporal.

• Discursivo: Construcción de discursos de acuerdo con uan intención , siguiendo estructuras expositivas, argumentativas, descriptivas, narrativas, conversionales y retóricas.

• Socio-lingüístico: Conocimiento del contexto cultural en el cual se produce el hecho verbal.

• Cultural: Comprensión general y particular que se tiene sobre el tema tratado.

FUENTES

• www.monografias.com/trabajos6/ores/ores.shtml , fecha de la consulta el 6 de febrero del 2008, hora de la consulta las 14:oo.

• http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oralidad , fecha de la consulta el 6 de febrero del 2008, hora de la consulta las 14:15.

GIZAKIAREN ERAGINA LURRARENGAN

     Nik uste dut, planeta hau jasaten ari den aldaketak gizakiak eragindakoak direla.

      Gure lehengo arbasoak planeta kutsatu barik, eta zikinkeria eragin barik bizi ziren, hau da, animaliak bizi diren antzera. Baina urteak joan ahala, gizakiok gero eta patxadazaleago bilakatu gara. Kristo aurreko urte haietan, telebista eta honen moduko teknologiak ez ziren beharrezkoak; urte horietako pertsonek nahi zuten guztia bere kabuz bilatzen eta lortzen zuten; adibidez, janaria nahi bazuten ehizatzera joaten ziren, etxebizitza bat behar bazuten eraiki egiten zuten. Baina gaur egun, ia nahi dugun guztia lor dezakegu ia sofatik mugitu gabe. Hau guztiaondo irudituko litzaidake, lurraren suntsipenaren arrazoia izango ez balitz.

       Gizakiak erosoago sentitu daitezen, zenbait pertsonak lurraren bizi iraupenerako kaltegarriak diren hainbat gauza asmatu ditu, gaur egun pertsona askorentzat edo gehienentzat ezinbestekoak diren lehengaiak agortzen hasi dira. Hona hemen adibide batzuk:

• Guk, leku batetik bestera desplazatzeko erabiltzen ditugun auto, abioi, autobus eta bestelakoek sortzen dituzten keak ozono geruza apurtu egiten dute,eta geruza hori, guztiok dakigunez, bizitzeko ezinbestekoa da, eguzkiak eragiten dituen izpi kaltegarriak gelditzen baititu. Berdin gertatzenda guk erabiltzen kotxe, abioi  eta abarrekoak egiteko erabiltzen diren burdin eta altzairuekin, hauek egiteko sortu diren fabriken keak ere oso kaltegarriak dira.

•  Bizitzeko ezinbestekoa den elementua, alegia, ura, agortzeko arriskuan dago, urte batzuk eta gero. Elementu hau gero eta eskasagoa bilakatzen hasi da. Gero eta ur gutxiago egotea, gizakiak egin duen gastu gehiegizkoa da, (beste faktore batzuk alde batera utzita); adibidez, dutxatzen garenean edota eskuak garbitzerakoan. Horrek ondorio izugarriak ekar ditzake. Hori ekiditzeko, zientifikoek aholku batzuk eman dituzte, jende gutxik jarraitzen dituenak; adibidez, bainatu ordez dutxa bat hartu, hortzak garbitzen ari garen bitartean grifoa itxi edota edan ez dugun ura sukaltarritik bota ordez, landareak ureztatzea gomendatzen dute. Hala eta guztiz ere, horrela jarraitzekotan, jende batzuk egindako esfortzuak ezinbestekoak izango dira.

• Beste arazo mota bat zikinkeria da. Gaur egun, jende askok, batez ere gazteek , zikinkeria lurrera botatzen dute eta horrek lurrazala kutsatu egiten du. Baina ez bakarrik lurrazala, itsasoa ere, eta honekin batera bertan bizi diren diren arrainn, krustazeo eta izaki bizidun guztiak. Honen ondorioz, bertan dagoen habitata apurtu egiten da eta hori berrezkuratzeno urte asko pasatu behar dira.

• Honekin lotuta dagoen beste gai bat erreziklajea da. Gai hau nahiko berria da, orain dela urte gutxi hasi baita proiektu hau martxan jartzen. Lehenengo momentuan, jende gutxik erreziklatzen zuten, jende askok pentsatzen baitzuten plastikoak, paperetatik eta janari organikotik banantzea denboragaltze utsa zela. Orain, berriz, gero eta jende gehiago konturatu da erreziklatzea oso garrantzitsua dela. Dena den, oraindik erreziklatzea tontakeria dela pentsatzen dute pertsona asko daude. Pertsona hauei esan beharko litzieke, erreziklatzea, kutsadura sahisteko bide ona dela, eta gainera, modurik errazena eta erosoena lurrari laguntzeko.

      Aurreko paragrafoetan aipatutako erreziklaia eta betetzeak eta energia berriztagarriak erabiltzeak alde onak eta alde txarrak izan ditzake:

      Alde batetik, jendearen heriotz-tasa beherantza joango litzateke, kutsadurak sortzen dituen keak gizakientzako ere txarrak baitira. Horrekin batera, osasuntsuago biziko ginateke, eta gaixotasun gutxiago izango genituzke. Gainera, lurrazala, itsasoak eta lurra orokorrean garbiago egongo lirateke eta itsasoaren-maila beherantz joango litzateke.

      Beste alde batetik, desabantailak gutxiago dira. Horietako bat diru mordoa erabili behar izana; batez ere, energia berriztagarriak martxan jartzeko eta jndeak hauek erabiltzeko. Energia berriztagarriak agortzen ez diren energia motak dira, hau da, eguzkien izpiak, uraren eta haizearen indarra eta abar aprobetxatzea, guretzat erabilgarria izango den energia bihurtuz. Baina, arazoa da eguzki izpien bidez darabilen kotxeak diru asko balio duela,  eta ondorioz, jendeak ez dituela kotxe horiek erosiko. Orduan, nik uste dut gobernuak kotxe eta etxebizitza hauen prezioak jaitsi beharko lituzketela.

       Azkenik, esan beharrekoa da, kutsadurak honela jarraitzen badu , planeta honen iragana oso ilun ikusten dudala. Jendea ez da konturatzen honla jarraitzekotan itsasoaren uraren-maila handituko dela eta Iberiar Penintsulan eta beste hainbat lekutan desertifikazioa gertatuko dela. Honekin batera janaria gero eta eskasagoa izango da, ura agortzn den heinean. Hori guztia gertatzeko urte asko pasatu behar dira, baina hori sahiestea posiblea dela jakinda, esfortu bat egitea beharrezkoa da.