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The application is currently at the test stage. This implementation of Apertium constitutes another step forwards in the UOC’s decision to create a Global Campus. In a multilingual environment, this translation engine becomes a tool for ensuring communication between people speaking different languages.

This application offers a sufficiently good translation to understand a text written in another language or to obtain a draft translation that will save time. It currently translates Catalan texts into Spanish, English and French and vice versa, but it can also be extended with any of the twenty-one language pairings currently available.

Some of the lines of development that the Office of Learning Technologies, the Chair in Multilingualism and the UOC’s Language Service continue to work on include translation of PDF files, support for UOC-specific vocabulary and incorporation of semantic domains (law, art, IT, etc.) to adapt translations even more closely to the field in question, and improvement of the quality of the Catalan-Spanish and Catalan-English language pairings.

Apertium is an open-source initiative based on InterNostrum and Universia translators, developed by the Transducens research team from the Department of Languages and IT Systems at the University of Alicante in collaboration with Prompsit Language Engineering. In addition to these two organisations, the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade, the Catalan government’s Department of Telecommunications and the Information Society, and the Romanian Ministry for Foreign Affairs have also taken part in the project.

The project is being developed as part of the language technologies strategic line of projects, which you can find out more about on the http://cookingattheuoc.wordpress.com blog.