Subject: Re: more about PC Translation software

From: LI Wei <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1992 00:33:15 GMT

As I have received more enquiries about English Chinese machine
translation softwares, I decide to send the following message to the
net. (Haizi: I got your second message and tried in vain to send a reply to
you: perhaps your email address is wrong?? Anyway you can read this.)
Forwarded message:
> From wei Tue Feb  4 14:37:19 1992
> From: LI Wei <[email-masked]>
> Date: Tue, 4 Feb 92 14:37:17 GMT
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: more about PC Translation software
> Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
>
> TRANSTAR (TRANslation + STAR, like WORDSTAR, not TRNASTAR) is an
English-Chinese Machine Translation System  designed and developed by
Prof. DONG Zhendong and his group and was put to market 3 or 4 years
ago. In the last few years they have developed var> ious technical
dictionaries to enlarge its coverage. In the Mainland China, this is a
very popular software and there was once a special issue of the
newspaper Computer World introducing this software. Further
information can be obtained from an instituti> on formerly named
China's Software Techniques Company. (ZHONG1GUO2 RUAN3JIAN4 JI4SHU4
GONG1SI1, or ZHONG1 RUAN3 GONG1SI1, which originally was located in
Haidian District in the campus of HANG2KONG1 XUE2YUAN4) I forgot the
present name of this company.
> I am myself a machine translation researcher for over 8 years, and personally
 I think that TRANSTAR is really better than any other marketed English-Chinese
 MT systems. But still, don't expect too much. MT is a truly difficult research
 and  engineering su> bject. Just think how difficult a human learns a foreign
 language. However, if you have some technical materials  which need fast
 translation, try it and perhaps you will be happy enough to accept the machine
 translation.
> There are other MT projects under development and the quality should
be better than TRANSTAR. In one or two years, more products will be
available, including the one I have been working at. Wait and see!
> Wei LI
P.S. The good news is that TRANSTAR is going to appear in the American
software market. Friends told me that negotiations are underway. As
far as I know, although most users are in the mainland, there are a
few foreign buyers. The price in China is about 10,000 yuan. But with
enlarged dictionaries in various subject areas, the newest version may
be somewhat more expensive. I have got no idea, however, about the
price to sell it abroad.

Besides there is also a Chinese to English software available in that
company with the price about the same. But I don't think there are
users who would like to use it unless for fun. I don't mean the
designer did a poor job. I quite admire him for his effort. But the
work is TOO difficult to be practical in forseeable future. Chinese
analysis and understanding are truly difficult: it is a good and
stimulating research topic but not a right choice for engineering
software project.

English has been most widely studied and still there are quite some
problems in analysing it. Generally, the ambiguous nature of human
languages makes it hard. However, time has seen remarkable progress in
the last few years in the area of natural language processing and
machine translation. As for Chinese information processing, the most
advance is with Chinese characters' processing. Chinese analysis at
syntactic and semantic level, which is the prerequisite for Chinese
understanding and Chinese to other language translation, is still in
its ABC stage. Experiments show that Chinese generation is much easier
than Chinese analysis. That is why an MT system from a foreign
language to Chinese is more likely to succeed that the one from
Chinese to another language. Of course, to generate "pure" (DAO4DI4)
Chinese is by no means an easy job. But to generate some
"understandable" (or "horse-horse-tiger-tiger"--MAMAHUHU) Chinese or
Chinglish sentence is not difficult.

Wei LI

---

From: Thomas Chin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1992 00:19:42 -0600

Speaking about English Chinese machine translation software, is there
possibly a public domain English-Chinese electronic dictionary ?  I would
be very interested in writing a dictionary program on the Mac if such a
database does exist.  It would in fact be a good Chinese input method for a
lot of people.

Thanks.

-Tom