4.0743 Qs: Chinese; Hyphens; Amharic Machine Xlation (3/71)

Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Fri, 23 Nov 90 23:49:17 EST

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0743. Friday, 23 Nov 1990.


(1) Date: Tue, 20 Nov 90 16:19:10 EST (18 lines)
From: Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: machine-assisted translation?

(2) Date: Wed, 21 Nov 90 15:16:30 +0000 (16 lines)
From: Dominik Wujastyk <ucgadkw@ucl.ac.uk>
Subject: British hyphenation dictionaries

(3) Date: Wed, 21 Nov 90 10:21:41 cst (37 lines)
From: "Francis,Bill" <RISKS@GRIN1.Bitnet>
Subject: Chinese character display

(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 90 16:19:10 EST
From: Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: machine-assisted translation?

A non-networked colleague here is interested in finding out
what tools may exist to help him translate from English into
Amharic (the language of Ethopia, South Semitic, Sabian alphabet).
He is a person without much institutional support so cannot envision
buying a major commercial system or the services of a translation
bureau. Where should he start? Are there any relatively simple
packages that, for example, would offer links to on-line lexica
and the tools with which to build those lexica? Is the European
Community involved in any activities he should know about?

Thanks very much.


Willard McCarty
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------31----
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 90 15:16:30 +0000
From: Dominik Wujastyk <ucgadkw@ucl.ac.uk>
Subject: British hyphenation dictionaries

Dear Humanists,

I am looking for a list of British English words with correct hyphenation
points marked. I have found a printed list of 60000 (The Oxford
Minidictionary of spelling and word-division, 1986), but am reluctant
to type it out (assuming OUP gave me permission).

Have any of you Corpus Archivists, with all your terabytes, got such
an item?

Dominik

(3) --------------------------------------------------------------43----
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 90 10:21:41 cst
From: "Francis,Bill" <RISKS@GRIN1.Bitnet>
Subject: Chinese character display

I have posted this question to ccnet without receiving any answers.
Please excuse me if you have already seen this.

At Grinnell we use Tian Ma on IBM PC compatibles with success. We would
like to have similar capabilities for faculty in Chinese studies who use
Macintoshes. Since I am a computing person, not a scholar on Chinese, I
am not exactly sure what they are, except that we would like to be able
to display "traditional" as well as simplified Chinese characters. The
following note from one of the faculty may help.

Any suggestions about Macintosh software would be appreciated.

Bill Francis RISKS@GRIN1
*********************
Date Monday, November 19, 1990 at 8:04 am
>From Hoare,Stephanie
To Francis,Bill
Subj Chinese and computing

Thanks for the information. The problem with the Mac is that there are
two different ways of writing Chinese characters: complex
("traditional") and simplified, and Mac only does simplified. Tianma
does both. "Pinyin" is a romanization system--we use the western
alphabet to phoneticize Chinese words, and the software converts the
pinyin into Chinese characters. I think both Tianma and MacChinese work
this way. We teach the students pinyin, simplified, AND complex
characters, and Tianma seems to be the only program that does all three.

The BITNET service sounds like a good idea--do you have its address?

Thanks again. --Stephanie