Russian-French At GETA: Outline Of The Method And Detailed Example

This paper is an attempt to present the computer models and linguistic strategies used in the current version of the Russian-French translation system developed at GETA, within the framework of several other applications which are developed in a parallel way, using the same computer system. This computer system, called ARIANE-78, offers to linguists not trained in programming an interactive environment, together with specialized metalanguages in which they write linguistic data and procedures (essentially, dictionaries and grammars) used to build translation systems. In ARIANE-78, translation of a text occurs in six steps : morphological analysis, multilevel analysis, lexical transfer, structural transfer, syntactic generation, morphological generation. To each such step corresponds a computer model (nondeterministic finite-state string to tree transducer, tree to tree transducer,...), a metalanguage, a compiler and execution programs. The units of translation are not sentences, but rather one or several paragraphs, so that the context usable, for instance to resolve anaphores, is larger than in other secondgeneration systems.