Integrated development of English - Spanish machine translation : from pilot to full operational capability - technical report

Accordingly, in 1983 A.I.D. provided a grant enabling the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) to develop its English-Spanish translation program, ENGSPAN, which is based on PAHO"s earlier, Spanish-English program, SPANAM, in use since 1980. The major accomplishments of the A.I.D. grant period are detailed here, with emphasis on innovative solutions to difficult problems. Successive chapters detail the different subprograms and operations which allow the program to analyze the context in order to translate more accurately phrases and idiomatic expressions requiring more than word-to-word conversion. ENGSPAN also makes use of specialized mini-dictionaries in such as areas as law, finance, and agriculture, employing in all over 40,000 vocabulary entries. Further developments and directions are discussed, along with plans to rewrite ENGSPAN to make it capable of being run on a microcomputer instead of the present mainframe systems. Extensive appendices showing translation procedures and actual unedited machine translations complete the report.