MT Technology

Rather than directly writing a computer program to translate between two natural languages, a thoughtful designer of a machine translator uses a generic MT Technology. MT Technology, as understood here, is a development environment which makes machine translation system development efficient, theoretically sound, and rigorous.

The development of a generic MT Technology is a theoretically challenging task. However, once such software is fully implemented and tested by building a concrete machine translation system on the basis of the technology, building additional translators will be efficient and their quality will be good.

Sunda has designed an innovative and theoretically sound MT Technology, which is applicable to the languages that use the Roman alphabet or whose sentences can be converted to such a form. The technology relies on sound linguistic theories, and it produces deterministic translators whose translation time of a sentence is the linear function of the number of words in the sentence.

To test it rigorously in a real system, Sunda has built a machine translator from English into Finnish. The English-Finnish translator indirectly demonstrates the quality of the MT Technology. Translation quality is promising. Translation speed on a standard PC is about 1000 sentences per second. We are currently developing an English-Swedish translator too.