| This study is a description and evaluation of a prototype automatic sentential translation system, called FTL, which translates Mandarin Chinese into English. A survey of existing machine translation systems and a typology based upon their design and method of development are also presented in this study.;Conceptually, the FTL system borrows from the functional-notional approach to language learning. The metavariables of the two two-level grammars correspond to the functions of the input language, and the protovariables and terminals of the two two-level grammars roughly correspond to the notions of the input sentence.;The FTL system has translation capabilities at the low to intermediate level of Chinese proficiency as defined by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The FTL system is unique among current machine translation systems in its use of two-level grammars for parsing and for generation, and in its focus on communicative function for translation.;The FTL translating system, which is written in LISP is a transfer system with some direct translation features. The system parses a Chinese input sentence using an augmented transition network based upon a two-level grammar of Chinese. The highest-level metavariables in the two-level grammar of Chinese are keyed to the communicative function of the input sentence. After the parse is completed, the system transfers syntactic, semantic, and functional information to its generation module. Generation of the English output sentence is performed by an augmented transition network based upon a two-level grammar of English. |
