Saturday, November 30, 2013

updates on language technology for Paraguay

As I wrote earlier, we've been working on language technology for Paraguay. There are a few of us on some related projects, with the goal of building both useful translation software for Spanish-Guarani and a nice website where folks can do collaborative translations, eventually with computer-assisted translation included! We're building these tools with reusability in mind too -- they should be applicable to other under-resourced language pairs in the near future.

The first tool is coming along: we've been building out Guampa, the collaborative translation website; we should be ready for the first beta users really soon. We would love some help on this system: if you're into software development and/or want to help build resources for the Guarani language, let's chat!

Coming next, watch for the Tereré translation system and the accompanying Chipa word-sense disambiguation module, completing our "Paraguayan afternoon snack" metaphor for translation tools...

In related news, the Mozilla Paraguay folks have been really busy, gearing up to translate Firefox into Guarani, in collaboration with FP-UNA. The Guarani Ñe'ẽ discussion group has been buzzing about this; from my vantage point in the frozen northern anglohablante climes, it looks like everybody is pumped about this. Pretty exciting times.