Development of the EtsaTrans translation system prototype and its integration into the Parnassus meeting administration system

Abstract

The issue of multilingualism at the University of the Free State (UFS) gained momentum with the development of the EtsaTrans translation system which is being developed according to the principles of example-based machine translation. In this article the development of the system prototype is described, and an exposition is given of the compilation of the domain-specific parallel-aligned bilingual English-Afrikaans corpus. The complete translation process is described, as well as the integration of EtsaTrans into the Parnassus meeting management system. Parnassus increases the efficiency of meetings and facilitates the compilation of minutes through decentralisation. This unique integration facilitates the task of the secretariat thus considerably accelerating the flow of information to everyone involved.

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2007, 25(2): 225–238