Call for Information: Arabic and Farsi Machine Translation

Jeff Jarvis unfortunately buries his lead in a post re Spirit of America fundraising: Both SixApart (typepad) and Blogger have agreed to help put together useable Arabic versions so the circle of Middle East bloggers can be expanded beyond those with English language skills. Tip of the hat and best wishes to them, as well as SoA's own project to produce an Arabic blogging tool.

So let me do the VC thing and ask the "lead the duck" question: Assuming we can foster an Arabic blogging community, how do we stay connected across the language barrier? Yes, there are dedicated folks working at manually translating blog posts and comments at places like Sarmad's Road of a Nation Forums, but it's a grind and slows the action to a crawl.

One part of the answer is to throw cheap cycles at the problem, that is, machine translation. Yes, I'm fully aware of the limitations of the technology, but a cheap something is better than an expensive nothing. And we can all find common ground in making fun of the translation software, at the least.

To that end, I'd like to ask the help of readers to identify best-of-breed technology sources for translation between English and Arabic and Farsi. I'm already aware of Language Weaver and Meaningful Machines on the Arabic to English front. Since much of the development in these areas has been funded (quite openly) by DARPA and In-Q-Tel, there's more available for the path into English than the other way, but we're going to need both, so please send in any tips. The current state-of-the-art has moved to corpus based translation, but an older rule based system would be better than nothing. Right now, this is a technology survey, we'll worry about how to get the systems integration and business deals done later.

Got a clue for me? I'm opening comments on this post for the first time in DD's history. Warning: OT entries will be deleted ruthlessly; I have no tolerance for troll droppings. Expect the comments to be closed about two weeks after the original entry; if you're a late comer, see my e-mail address on the About page.

Comments

[Jeff Jarvis]

SixApart and Blogger haven't yet agreed to do Arabic versions of their tools but instead will help others use unicode and such to make it happen. Arabic is apparently on their lists but behind other languages with more commercial potential.

[Ross Mayfield]

Two recent related posts:

http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/global_bloogel.html

http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/the_speed_of_la.html

[LE BLEVENNEC]

Dear Sir,

I have read with interest your article.
I would like to inform you that SYSTRAN English<>Arabic has been released in June 2004.
Please do not hesitate to consult our website for further information www.systransoft.com.
We have also developped a website in English, French and Arabic "ALMA" in the framework of the Inco-Med programme co-financed by the EC(http://scripts.oieau.fr/alma/).

You can also contact our R&D director Mr.Senellart at jsenellart@systran.fr

[Ali Reza Ebadat]

Dear sir,
I want to introduce you Pars Translator as English to Farsi - Persian translation software.

Online English to Persian translation in 38 fields of sciences is available too.

for more ioformation please check http://www.ParsTranslator.Net

[Myriam Siftar]

Hello,

Please allow me to introduce MTM LinguaSoft's translation software for Arabic/English/French language pair. We recently participated in the AMTA conference in DC, where we demonstrated:
SEMAP-trans, our bidirectional semantic translation software for Arabic/English language pair.

SEMAP-trans v4.0 lets you translate texts with confidence between Arabic, English and French. With one software package, you can translate documents from multiple subject domains. We offer 20 specialized dictionaries to use in addition to the general dictionary and the capability to develop your own user dictionary.

Beyond the traditional user dictionary functionalities, SEMAP-trans gives you the ability to manage multiple meanings and interactively select the most appropriate sense when word sense disambiguation occurs.

SEMAP-trans also gives user the ability to create and use a Translation Memory to ensure terms consistency and improve accuracy.

Delivering higher translation productivity than human translators, SEMAP-trans answers the needs of global corporations, government agencies and translation agencies that need to quickly translate large volumes of Arabic text. Freelance translators use this product to boost their productivity and re-use past translation "chunks" to focus on editing where sense ambiguity may arise.

For a list of features and benefits, see the SEMAP-trans product data sheet.

(www.mtmlinguasoft.com/SEMAP_trans_datasheet_v4.pdf).

[Tim Oren]

Thanks for the input, everyone. I'm going to close comments on this post now, so it doesn't get bombed by comment spam bots. My e-mail is in the About page if you're coming late and have more information. In due course, I'll check all these out, collate with input I received on the similar post at Winds of Change, and put out a summary of options.