Re: target language grammars.

  ralphpboland@yahoo.com (Ralph Boland) schreibt:


>Does it make sence to make use of a grammar of the target language in
>any way?


Grammars can be seen from two viewpoints: they can be used to
recognize sentences, but they also can be used to construct sentences
of a language. A language translator (from language into language)
depends on a common intermediate structure (parse tree...), that can
be produced from language A and then can be transformed into language
B.


This is just the point where the translation of natural languages
failed, because it usually is impossible to create such a unique
intermediate representation. This can be observed in re-translations,
e.g. from English into Russian and back again into English. In natural
languages a word-by-word translation is useless, and also a
sentence-by-sentence translation often is not appropriate. In a
translation of formal languages it may be possible to translate
without considering too much context information, depending on the
involved languages. Nonetheless it's IMO a good idea to look at the
problems in natural language translations, in order to find out how
the developed techniques can be used in a translation of formal
languages.


Perhaps it's a good idea to develop language translators in pairs,
i.e. A->B together with B->A, in order to figure out a useful common
intermediate representation for such translations.


DoDi

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