GF Summer School is working towards deeper understanding within the European Union
News: Aug 03, 2009
In mid-August 2009, around 30 people will gather in Sweden for the GF Summer School - to work with the language tool Grammatical Framework, GF. One of the goals for the (near) future is to make GF perform perfect simultaneous translations between all 23 official languages in the European Union. There is a growing need of correct translations, both in the daily work in Brussels and also when information has to be distributed to all the inhabitants in the European Union.
Grammatical Framework is a data programme (for the grammar) combined with a database (for the words) that has been made for use in different translation tools. Just by one single click it generates grammatically correct translations of all languages that are inserted in the programme. The simultaneous characteristics in GF are perfect for the needs in the European Union.
Today all the big European languages are represented in Grammatical Framework, together with Danish, Norweigan, Finnish, Swedish, Bulgarian, and Catalan. Five new official EU languages will be put into GF, starting during the GF Summer School: Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Maltese. Apart from the EU languages there is also work going on regarding Hindi/Urdu, Arabic, and Icelandic. According to the plans, 20 new languages will be available for correct translations in GF at the turn of the year.
To put the whole construction of a language into a data programme and a database is time-consuming! It takes about one or two months per language to incorporate the structure and form of th
e language, the morphology, into GF. To put in the whole grammar (the syntax), it takes about six months per language. The participants in the GF Summer School need to be native speakers of the language they have choosen to work with, and also to be on Master's or PhD level in linguistics, computer science, or mathematics.
Contact:
Professor Aarne Ranta, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Gothenburg
+46 31 772 10 82
+358 40 4841676
E-mail