Goals and promises

We will release the first prototype of MOLTO web service in June 2010. This prototype will be constantly updated, and more mature tools will be released during 2011. The case studies will be finished in late 2012. But you can already now get an idea of the underlying technology by trying out a fridge magnet demo or a text input demo.

The main thing we use for each language in MOLTO is a resource grammar, which is actually a software library that defines the grammatical rules of the language: its word inflection and syntactic structures. Writing a resource grammar for a new language requires an effort of 3--6 months from a reasonably skilled programmer with good theoretical and practical knowledge of the language.

Human translators will always be better than MOLTO at making intelligent decisions about style, and hence produce more elegant text. On the other hand, MOLTO will be good at terminologies and idiomatic usages in specialized domains, for which human translators might lack training.

This is exactly what we want to make easier. Traditionally, it has been an effort of years to build a translation system of any reasonable size. We want to bring this down to months, in some cases even to days. And we want it to be doable for persons without special training in MOLTO, in linguistics, or in programming. Read the "Technology" section to find out how we believe we can do this.

MOLTO translators are specialized to different domains, which use language in uniform and well-understood ways. In MOLTO itself, we will build systems for three such domains: mathematical exercises, biomedical patents, and museum object descriptions. But these domains are just examples, which help us to develop and evaluate the tools; we expect the tools to be applicable to new domains by other people. Examples of such domains could be e-commerce sites, Wikipedia articles, contracts, business letters, user manuals, and software localization.