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The present paper is the profile of the Ph.D. dissertation submitted to Tamil University by Miss S. Kamakshi under the supervision of S. Rajendran. The demand for teaching Linguistics in Tamil has made it mandatory to look for a tool which helps in translating English Text books in English into Tamil. So a project with an aim to prepare a Machine Translation Aid (MTA) to translate Linguistics texts in English into Tamil was visualized and Kamakshi was entrusted to test certain hypotheses and view point on MTA. This has culminated into a dissertation by Kamakshi (July, 2001). Here in this paper we try to portray the strategy thus evolved to translate English Text books of linguistics into Tamil by means of MTA.
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Lack of good translations is one of the reasons for low visibility of Indian literature in general and Telugu in particular. All the bhasha literatures need global visibility since each of it has its own poetics in the way it negotiates the modern nation. Therefore it becomes all the more important for translations to reject universalised, global and Standard English. What is needed in translations therefore is to explore the ways of bringing out the ‘interiority’ of the bhasha literatures. Bhasha literatures traverse a long way before they are archived for the posterity. Unlike the English works, the Indian publications in regional languages do not enjoy the patronage of the readers in monetary terms. From getting published in the periodicals and small magazines, the authors struggle hard to self-publish their anthologies investing their hard earned money. To add to this, the authors find it difficult to market and circulate their publications. Anthologisation, translation and publication of the bhasha literatures in English have a long way to go.
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The architecture of sentence building mechanism of English has been studied thoroughly. The ways by which parsing can be performed on the English text and get the needed parsed tree for lexical and structural transfer have been identified. The word building, phrase building, clause building and sentence building mechanisms of English have been investigated. The constituent structures of NP, VP, Adj. P, Adv. P and PP have been explored. All the sentential patterns of English have been identified. With the help of these patterns it is hoped to get the parsed trees of English sentences in terms of words, phrases and clauses that can be converted into Tamil-oriented parsed trees that is liable for structural and lexical transfer. The word building mechanism of Tamil has been outlined to facilitate lexical transfer. Building of major phrases such as noun phrase, verb phrase, adjectival phrase, adverbial phrase and postpositional phrase have been studied with an eye on transfer mechanism. The clause building mechanism by subordination has been thoroughly explored. Different types of dependent and independent clauses have been identified and their structural patterns have been designed to facilitate transfer mechanism. The coordination of phrases and clauses has been dealt under the relevant heads. The architecture of building different types of Tamil sentences and their word orders have been studied with the aim of transferring the English sentences into Tamil. The mechanism of transferring English sentences into Tamil has been explored by correlating the syntactic structures of the two languages. The correlative study tried to explore the commonalities and differences in the structure of English and Tamil from the point of view of computation to build a machine translation aid to translate English into Tamil. It has been noticed that the two language deviate from one another from the point of view of English as language of SVO and Tamil as language of SOV, i.e. verb final language. While English makes use of preposition to link nominal arguments with verbs, Tamil makes use of postposition and case markers to serve the same purpose. The absence of regular case inflection in the case of English makes it rigid in its word order and the presence of case inflection in Tamil makes it more flexible in its word order. English distinguishes subject form object by means of the position, i.e. word order, where as Tamil does it by case inflection. Relative clause in English is after the head noun that is attributed and in Tamil it comes before the head noun. The infinitive clause in English comes after the main clause, whereas in Tamil it comes before the main clause. That-clause complement occurs at the right side of the main clause in English, whereas it occurs at the left side of the main clause in Tamil. Interrogation in English is effected by changing the order of the words, i.e. by moving an auxiliary verb to the initial position before subject Interrogation in Tamil is effected by suffixing interrogative clitics or by making use of interrogative pronouns. In English, the auxiliary verbs and the interrogative words occur in the initial position of the construction. In Tamil, the interrogative particles occur in the final position of any word in the construction. The unique characteristics of language of linguistics have been explored. In terms of selection of vocabulary and technical terms linguistics differs from other discipline. Its discourse structure is also unique in nature. It is a must for us to understand the language of linguistics as the aim of the thesis to translate linguistic text books in English into Tamil. What is applicable to English is also applicable to Tamil as for as the language of linguistics is concerned. As Tamil is still a developing language as for as the linguistic discourse is concerned, the transfer of ideas form English to Tamil is a hard task. The problem of finding equivalents for technical terms coupled with transferring linguistic discourse in English into Tamil is paramount problem. So it is essential to understand the unique features of language of linguistics before attempting to prepare an MTA for transferring linguistic knowledge in English into Tamil. A prototype of English-Tamil machine translation aid based on lexical and structural transfer approach has been prepared. No claim is made here that a full-fledged automatic translation can be achieved by making use of the present prototype. But the prototype can be converted into a full-fledged package for translating linguistics texts in English into Tamil with human interference if proper changes are adapted to suit the new requirements. The exhaustive correlative study of English and Tamil which amalgamates both contrastive and typological studies of the two languages will be a future documentation for one who will attempt for a full fledged MT system for transferring English into Tamil. We have a long way to go. But still we have made a beginning.
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