OpenLogos

OpenLogos is the Open Source version of the Logos Machine Translation System, one of the earliest and longest running commercial machine translation products in the world. It was developed by Logos Corporation in the United States, with additional development teams in Germany and Italy. Like the Logos System, OpenLogos admits different formats of documents and maintains the format of the original document in translation. OpenLogos does not claim to replace human translators; rather, it aims to enhance the professional translator's work environment.

History

Logos Corporation was founded by Bernard (Bud) Scott in 1970, who worked on its Logos System for thirty years, until the company's dissolution in 2000. Everything began with an English-Vietnamese translation system, which became operational in 1972 (during the American-Vietnam War). Thereafter, the Logos System was developed as a multi-target translation solution, with English and German as source languages. Recently the DFKI has been working on an open version of the original Logos program: OpenLogos. Today this tool is meant to be one of the most important ones and a real competitor to other major MT systems such as Systran or IBM's WebSphere. Its landmark are both its accuracy and the fact that it does not discard the need of a human translator. This new version works with Linux and is available for individuals, universities, translators under the GNU GPL license.

Languages

Up to this point the OpenLogos MT only translates from German and English into the largest European languages (French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese). The main aim is to provide a translation service among all of them.

Historical competitors

• SYSTRAN Language Translation Technologies
• SDL International and its free translator
• Intergraph
• Siemens' METAL MT

See also

• Apertium
• Comparison of machine translation applications
• Moses
• Weidner

Bibliography

• Anabela Barreiro, Bernard Scott, Walter Kasper and Bernd Kiefer. "OpenLogos Rule-Based Machine Translation". Machine Translation 25 (2011). Netherlands: Springer. ISSN: 0922-6567.
• Bernard Scott and Anabela Barreiro. "OpenLogos MT and the SAL representation language". In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Free/Open-Source Rule-Based Machine Translation / Edited by Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, Francis M. Tyers. Alicante, Spain: Universidad de Alicante. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos. 2–3 November 2009, pp. 19–26
• Bernard (Bud) Scott: "The Logos Model: An Historical Perspective", in Machine Translation, vol. 18 (2003), pp. 1–72
• Linguistic and computational motivations for the LOGOS machine translation system, by Bernard E. Scott
• OpenLogos introduction by Bernard (Bud) Scott in OpenLogos Mt-list (mailing list)
• The Logos Model: An Historical Perspective by Bernard (Bud) Scott

External links

• Official site
• SourceForge project home
• Technical overview of OpenLogos
• OpenLogos mailing list
• Translators' cafe on OpenLogos
• The origins of LOGOS (as a PDF file)
• FEMTI, Framework for the Evaluation of Machine Translation on ISLE.
• ISLE, International Standards for Language Engineering.