#1198: Auto Translating to kreyol : Lyall comments

[Robert Corbett <bcorbett@netcom.com>]

From: J. David Lyall <dlyall@cruzio.com>

>As I said yesterday the issue now should be what kind of system can be 
>established to support those who are writing in Creole, who want to make 
>quality reading materials available to Creole speakers, keeping in mind that 
>the majority of Creole speakers don't have money to buy books. Creole writers 
>don't have money either to do self -publishings.

I am curious about any progress being made on machine auto-translation
into creole/kreyol/haitian.

I have written some letters to kreyol speaking friends in hayti.
Now, my kreyol is tres inadequate, and I have no french.
I have used the english to french translating program at
AltaVista to do a preliminary translation of a letter a few times.
This gets me some words which I might use.
[ I upload to text to a web site, then load in the webtext from 
AltaVista translations ]

The syntax which results is rather garbled, of course.
Syntax rules in creole/kreyol/haitian seem to be rather
more flexible, and an auto translation program into
kreyol from english/french/spanish would be a great aid
in producing materials.

Who in  our village is working on this, and when/where
are such programs available?

----
J. David Lyall
     [ Jedidiah Daudi in full ki-swahili ]
http://members.cruzio.com/~dlyall/