RUSLAN - An MT System Between Closely Related Languages

RUSLAN - AN NT SYSTEM BETWEEN CLOSELY RELATED LANGUAGES Jan Haji~ J , , . Vyzkumny ustav matematxckych stroju , P J Loretanske nam. 3 118 55 Praha 1, Czechoslovakia ABSTRACT A project of machine translation of Czech computer manuals into Russian is described, presenting first a description of the overall system structure and concentrating then mainly on input text preparation and a parsing algorithm based on bottom-up parser programmed in Colmerauer's Q-systems. INTRODUCTION In mid-1985, a project of machine translation of Czech computer manuals into Russian was started, thus constituting a second MT project of the group of mathematical linguistics at Charles University (for a full description of the first project, see (Kirschner, 1982) and (Kirschner, in press)). Our goals are both practical (translation or re-translation of new or re-edited manuals for export purposes within the COMECON countries, of an estimated amount of 500 to I000 pages a year) and theoretical (we wish to verify our approach to the analysis of Czech and to develop a theoretical background for translation between closely related languages such as Czech and Russian). The project is carried out by V~S, Prague (Research Institute for Computing Machinery) at the Department of Software in cooperation with the Department of Mathematical Linguistics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague. Input texts The texts our system should translate are software manuals to V~MS-developed DOS-4 operating system which is an advanced extension to the common DOS. The texts are currently maintained on tapes under the editing and formatting system PES (Programmed Editing System). This system allows for preparation, editing and binding-ready printout using national printer chain(s). Texts are stored on tapes using an internal format containing upper/lowercase letters, editing & formatting commands, version number/identification, info on last-changed pages etc.; most of this can be used to improve the overall translation quality. On the other hand, part of it is somewhat confusing and must be handled carefully. By now, we have access to 65 manuals on tapes, containing about 12.000 pages (approx. 1.500.000 running words - 53.000 different word fomrs). The complete documentation covers 78 manuals and is still growing. 113 The overall structure RUSLAN is a unidirectional system dealing with one pair of languages (SL - Czech, TL - Russian). We adopt a transfer-llke translation scheme (in the sense we do not use any intermediate pilot language), but with many simplifications due to the close relationship between Czech and Russian, so that it belongs to the so-called direct method (in the sense of (Slocum, 1985)). The translation process itself is to be carried out in batch (we have to respect the hardware available). This means that no human intervention is possible during the process. Nevertheless, our aim is to obtain high-quallty results which would require usual post-editing only. No human pre-editing is contained in the system design. The translation unit is constituted by a single sentence. Thus, the recognition of sentence boundaries is a part of the preprocessing. For the time being, a treatment of ellipsis is …

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