UTL Universal Translation LanguageThe
evolution in the field of machine translation in the last few years has
proved the collaboration between the man and the machine (particularly in
form of pre-edition) to be one of the most promising ways for improving the
efficiency and accuracy of the translation process. The UTL project intends to be the ultimate step on this direction. The need
for translation of documents, web sites, catalogs, etc, into several foreign
languages is very high nowadays. If we want to translate any text into 10 or
15 languages, there are basically two possible methods: 1. Hiring
10 or 15 human translators to do the work (with or without computer
assistance). Results are: 2. Using
machine translation. Results are: With UTL there is a third
method available: 3. Using
UTL translation (one human translator + machine translation). Results are:
What is
UTL translation? UTL is a
new method for translation which is under development, and involves the
participation of one human translator and a machine translation software. Current
machine translation programs translate between natural languages (e.g. from
English into Spanish). Results are poor because machines are not smart enough
to understand natural languages. Machines make frequent mistakes when
analizing the source text, and these mistakes are transferred into the target
text. UTL is an
artificial language easy to understand for machines. If a human translator
translates the original text into UTL, and gives this UTL version to the
computer, the computer will be able to understand it and translate it
correctly into other languages. As a result of this method we can get 10 or 15 translations of top quality machine translation following just one hand-made translation.
UTL (which
stands for Universal Translation Language) is a human constructed language
mainly intended for professional usage. It is based on Esperanto, an
artificial human language whose suitability for machine translation (MT) has
already been observed by other developers in the past. Any document written
in this language can be machine-translated into natural languages with a high
level of accuracy. In this regard, UTL works similarly to so-called controlled
languages (cf. controlled English, in any of its versions), which are a
subset of a natural language intended for high quality MT. The advantages of
UTL over traditional controlled languages are a wider scope of applicability
and higher expressive capabilities. Traditional controlled languages are
based on natural languages that have been deprived of many of their
grammatical or lexical resources in order to avoid ambiguity. UTL, however,
is a complete, non-clipped language capable of expressing virtually any concept,
syntactic structure, verbal tense, etc., without limitations. UTL is prepared
to make use of its own words and words from other languages as well, which,
combined with UTL's powerful grammar, makes it a perfect tool to express any
kind of content in any domain, in a machine-tractable form. -Other pages on
this web site:
NOTES:
A
parsing tool has been prepared which analizes correctly and unambiguosly a
fair variety of UTL sentences, including complex ones. The UTL project was presented in the MT Summit VIII, held in Santiago de Compostela, September 2001. The contribution ("Multilingual Authoring through an Artificial Language") is available at their site.
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