FLExTrans

A Linguist-Friendly Machine Translation System for Low-Resource Languages

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FLExTrans

FLExTrans is linguist-friendly machine translation because a central component is the intuitive application Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx). This application serves as the repository for lexicons, the place where entries are linked and the tool for the analysis piece of the analysis-transfer-synthesis-style system. Apertium, the well-established open-source machine translation platform, is used for the transfer piece of the system and STAMP or HermitCrab for the synthesis piece. The linguist’s role is to analyze the source text with FLEx, link lexicon entries and write transfer rules to do either word or syntactic-level translation.

Read about FLExTrans being used successfully in the Philippines.

Analyze


Run one of FLEx's built in morphological parsers to break down each word in your text to its corresponding morphemes. Review and approve all analyses and you are ready for the next step.

Transfer


Link source word-senses to target word-senses for your text. Run FLExTrans modules to apply the Apertium engine to your custom-designed transfer rules. The result is target morphemes ready for the next step.

Synthesize


The final FLExTrans modules initiate STAMP to put target morphemes together to form your target text according to the allomorph rules in your target lexicon. Find your finished text in the target FLEx project.

Common Questions

Can FLExTrans help me translate between any two languages?

FLExTrans works best between related languages. In theory, you can translate between any two languages, but big linguistic difference mean lots of work to get translation working.

Do I have to have FLEx lexicons in order to use FLExTrans?

FLExTrans needs FLEx lexicons for the source and target languages. You can import from various formats to a FLEx lexicon. You can also gradually grow your lexicons as you go.

See full FAQ list