Opentrad, automatic translation project

Opentrad the automatic translation project will be made public at a press conference which will take place on 30 May at 11.30 in the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Barcelona).

Opentrad is an automatic translation project based on open-coded syntactic transference and which is valid for Spanish, Galician, Catalan/Valencian and Basque. Opentrad enables the translation of texts or documents as well as the navigation on webpages while translating at the same time. The language pairs that already have an operating prototype are:

– Spanish (es) <-> Catalan/Valencian (ca)
– Spanish <-> Galician (gl)
– Spanish ? Basque (eu) (the system only translates from Spanish to Basque, not vice-versa).

The system is based on two high-speed translation engines, programmed in C++: one that is a partial syntactic transference engine (known as Apertium) for similar language pairs (es-ca, es-gl), and another that is a complete syntactic transference engine (known as Matxin) for divergent language pairs (es-eu). The monolingual and multilingual linguistic data for all the languages making up the system is stored in XML, with a modular design which facilitates the interoperability of the data and its integration into the programme flow. The system has been designed in accordance with open code philosophy so that any software design company may incorporate Opentrad into its systems. The idea is to boost the use and integration of automatic translation into various programmes and environments.

The project has been designed and developed by a consortium made up of three companies and four universities, led by Eleka Ingeniaritza Linguistikoa S.L. (www.eleka.net). Besides Eleka, taking part in the project is the Elhuyar Foundation (the Basque Country) (www.elhuyar.org) and the imaxin|software company (www.imaxin.com) from Galicia. The participating universities are the University of the Basque Country, the University of d´Alacant (Valencia), the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and the University of Vigo.

The consortium began work in 2004 and the first results came in the first term of 2006.