News Eckhard Bick on 25 Oct 2008

Danish-German Dictionary

Dansk-tysk ordbog – Dänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch

GramTrans is developing a Danish-German translation module, and has just opened access to the system’s bilingual dictionary, so there is now a QuickDict interface for Danish-German, linked to a German DeepDict for contextual information. We expect to publish a first version of a Danish-German sentence and text translator by the end of the year.

News Tino Didriksen on 01 Sep 2008

Document Translation via Email

Subscribers can now translate documents by sending them to GramTrans via email. See Document Translation via Email for details.

News Eckhard Bick on 22 Jun 2008

Swedish translations

Symmetry has finally been established for GramTrans’ Swedish machine translation. Thus it is now possible to translate not only from, but also into Swedish. This feature has long been requested by our customers, and we have therefore accelerated development and decided to make Danish -> Swedish, Norwegian -> Swedish and English -> Swedish available at an early beta stage. However, since GramTrans relies on linguistically hand-designed rules and complex dictionary entries, the new “to-Swedish ” modules are not simple inversions of their “from-Swedish” counterparts, and they are not at all finished. Therefore, one should not yet expect the same performance for Danish/Norwegian/English -> Swedish as for Swedish -> Danish/Norwegian/English. One area of current work focus, for instance, is the inflexional generation of Swedish word forms, where corpus-based debugging has only just begun. As always, we welcome user feedback and bug reports regarding the new modules.

News Eckhard Bick on 29 May 2008

Norwegian updated

Between January and April the Norwegian->Danish system and the Norwegian->English Interlingua system have undergone a major overhaul. Thus, the Norwegian->Danish bilingual lexicon of over 200.000 entries has been increased, and for a large part been systematically checked against other dictionaries and internet usage. Also, special attention has been paid to productive compounding and the generation of equivalent Danish/English compounds. Finally, the translation engine as such has been revamped – it now uses full rule-based transfer (for both translation and word ordering) already at the Norwegian->Danish (Interlingua) level, just like the Danish->English standard system. Between May 26th and May 27th, The Danish->Norwegian MT pair has been the focus of a special GramTrans workshop, and besides being an important part of the English->Norwegain Interlingua pair, Danish->Norwegian is now a good example for how “almost perfect” inter-Scandinavian machine translation can become. Last, but not least, document translation and the browser plugin feature have recently been activated for Norwegian.

News Eckhard Bick on 11 Apr 2008

New lexicon feature

Many people use GramTrans not just for machine translation, but also – or primarily – as a dictionary service, and for those users we have long provided the QuickDict feature – a simple lexicon lookup for individual words (including inflected words), where alternative translations can be preserved rather than contextually discarded. We have now gone one better and offer the DeepDict lexifier, a full “Learner’s Dictionary” lookup providing usage information for the target language words, as well as example sentences and statistical information. Just click on the QuickDict translation (in red).

DeepDict is also available as such, of course, for direct lookup, and has its own page on the GramTrans site. For now, the QuickDict->DeepDict link works for the English side of Danish->English translations, while direct lookups also cover Danish and Spanish DeepDict, with more languages in the pipeline. As a target group we envision not just translators, but also schools, researchers and lexicographers. DeepDict is based on the grammatical and statistical analysis of huge text corpora, and can thus offer a unique and authentic overview of lexical usage, far beyond the scope of ordinary dictionaries.

News Eckhard Bick on 24 Jan 2008

New registration policy

As of today, we would like to ask all GramTrans users to register, even our many non-commercial users. Registration continues to be free of charge for small scale usage, but it will help us to do research on things like usage patterns and individual vocabulary spread, and thus develop better individualized services, such as the upcoming user dictionary feature. We apologize for the inconvenience and hope you will understand.

Please note also that our fair use policy, i.e. free use limitations on text length and number of translations per day, are not affected by registration policy. These limits have their own policy and are simply a means to define regular/volume users and/or commercial users – both of which can also achieve unlimited access, but only in connection with a regular subscription, Personal or Commercial, respectively. We might add that a quality translation service like GramTrans, unlike statistical or word list systems, involves a lot of specialised human labour which ultimately can be ensured only by a majority of satisfied customers willing to make a financial contribution. For the same reason we have been forced to allow a – limited – advertisement side bar, which – by the way – will not be visible for subscribing users. The world runs on compromises – please bear with us.

News Eckhard Bick on 03 Jan 2008

Substantial improvements for English – Danish

We have made some major upgrades for the English-Danish language pair, concerning both grammar and lexicon. The latter has been under continuous manual enlargement for many months, and now covers English words down to a frequency of about 1:10,000,000, roughly 90.000 entries (lemma/lexeme) in all, including many multi-word expressions and technical terms. The improvements will, of course, affect the English-Norwegian language pair as well, since the latter uses Danish as an interlingual

The site’s dictionary function (QuickDict), long successful for Danish-English, has now also been activated for English-Danish. This feature will handle look-up of individual words in a more meaningful, dictionary-style fashion than would be the case with text translation alone, avoiding meaningless disambiguation or, for instance, misinterpretation of single words as (imperative) sentences.

News Tino Didriksen on 22 Oct 2007

Testing Document Translation

We have opened the Document Translation tool for a public test phase.

News Tino Didriksen on 06 Sep 2007

Norwegian again

We have reactivated the Norwegian translation engines using a new experimental preprocessor from Kaldera Språkteknologi AS:

News Tino Didriksen on 04 Sep 2007

WAP Mobile Interface

Added a WAP (WML 1.1) interface which can be accessed at https://gramtrans.com/wml/

As this is the first mobile interface, we would like to get some feedback on how to improve it before we expand it to other mobile presentation profiles.

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