LINGUIST List 6.1513

Fri Oct 27 1995

FYI: Instituto da Lingua Galega, Bitrans Version 2

Editor for this issue: Ann Dizdar <dizdartam2000.tamu.edu>

Directory

1. "Xulio C. Sousa Fernandez", More about ILG Page
2. Jacques Guy, Software available: Bitrans Version 2

The Instituto da Lingua Galega at the University of Santiago de
Compostela is pleased to annouce that there are more home pages on the
Web (Phonology, Spelling, Morphology and Syntax). This home pages are
written in galician. Shortly it will be possible to found them in English.
The URL is: http://www.usc.es/~ilgas

Come take a look.

Xulio Sousa.

I am quite surprised that so few complained about the 3 very silly
bugs of version 1 (and no-one about a harder-to-trigger bug).
I felt morally obliged to upload a corrected version, and, at the
same time, to implement sorely needed improvements. This second
version is now available at garbo.uwasa.fi in pc/linguistics/bitrans2.zip

Replaces: bitrans1.zip
Uploader name & email: Jacques B.M. Guy -- j.guytrl.oz.au
Author or company: Jacques B.M. Guy
Email address: j.guytrl.oz.au
Surface address: Telstra Research Laboratories, PO Box 249,
		 Clayton 3168 Australia
Special requirement: nil
Shareware payment from private users: no
Shareware payment required from corporate users: no
Distribution limitations: gnu-like
Demo: no
Nagware: no
Self-documenting: no
External documentation included: yes (18 pages)
Source included: yes (Turbo Pascal 5.5)
Size: 72k compressed, 196k expanded

10-line description:

BiTrans will translate a text written in any transliteration system
(e.g. Chinese written in pinyin) into almost any other system (e.g.
the Giles-Wade system), provided that it is given the necessary
translation rules. One of the example files provided contains the
rules for translating from pinyin into Giles-Wade. Those rules are
fully commented and can be used as a practical tutorial. BiTrans
can be used to simulate phonological change, but does not allow
for metathesis.


Long Description:

Differences between this version and the previous one:

 1. Four bugs corrected.
 2. A new option reformats the translation before writing it to
 file.
 3. Version 1 was limited to 255-character Pascal strings, this
 version uses strings automatically redimensioned, up to 64K-
 characters long.
 4. Strings to be substituted can contain spaces and control
 characters (except CR, LF and Ctrl-Z).
 5. Easier lower and upper-case definition: you can add to the
 current alphabet instead of having to redefine it in its
 entirety.
 6. Control characters and extended ASCII characters can be input
 symbolically (e.g. \C or \3 for Ctrl-C) instead of having to
 be typed from the numeric keypad.
 7. Debugging mode shows the translation process on the screen
 instead of sending its intermediate results to a file.
 8. Better and faster algorithms for context-sensitive substitutions
 at word boundaries, and for preserving upper and lower-case
 distinctions.
 9. Preprocessing commands: Prepend, Append, Collapse (reduces
 multiple spaces to single).
10. Context-sensitive rules at line boundaries.
11. Search for the translator file in the path when not in the current
 directory.
12. Statistics. When exiting normally BiTrans now gives you three
 statistics: time spent on input/ouput, time spent reading and
 building the translator, and time spent translating.