MOLTO - Multilingual On-line Translation - Annual Report 2010-2011

MOLTO’s goal is to develop a set of tools for translating texts between multiple languages in real time with high quality. MOLTO uses domainspecific semantic grammars and ontology-based interlinguas implemented in GF (Grammatical Framework), a grammar formalism where multiple languages are related by a common abstract syntax. GF has been applied in several small-to-medium size domains, typically targeting up to ten languages but MOLTO will scale this up in terms of productivity and applicability by increasing the size of domains and the number of languages. MOLTO aims to make the technology accessible for domain experts without GF expertise and to reduce the effort needed for building a translator to just extending a lexicon and writing a set of example sentences. The most research-intensive parts of MOLTO are the two-way interoperability between ontology standards (OWL) and GF grammars, and the extension of rule-based translation by statistical methods. The OWL-GF interoperability will enable multilingual natural-language-based interaction with machine-readable knowledge while the statistical methods will add robustness to the system when desired. MOLTO technology will be released as open-source libraries for standard translation tools and web pages and thereby fit into standard workflows.