Open Access

Paul Otto Samuelsdorff

• The aim of any Automatic Translation project is to give a mechanical procedure for finding an equivalent expression in the target language to any sentence in the source language. The aim of my linguistic translation project is to find the corresponding structures of the languages dealt with. The two main problems that have to be solved by such a project are the difference of word order between the source language and the target language and the ambiguous words of the source language for which the appropriate word in the target language has to be chosen. The first problem is of major linguistic interest: once the project has been worked out, it will give us the parallel sentence structures for the two languages in question. Since there is no complete analysis of any language that could be used for the purpose of automatic translation, we decided to build up our project sentence by sentence. The rules which are needed for translating each sentence will have to be included in the complete program anyway, and the translation may be checked and corrected immediately. The program is split up into subroutines for each word-class, so that a correction of the program in case of an unsatisfactory translation does not complicate the program unnecessarily.