Welcome

Welcome to the project tbc (Translations By Computers), a project with the goal to provide a way, to write documents once and get it translated to each natural language automatically by the computer.

How can this work?

The idea is, to provide a formal language, in which ppl can write documentations, and then write a compiler, which translated documents from this formal language to human readable text. You could simply think about this as like writing documents in DOCBOOK, and then export it to html, txt, pdf and so on. An example: A text in the formal language of »OBJECT(MYSELF) ACTION(READING) SUBJECT(BOOK) WHEN(NOW)« could be translated in English to: »I am reading a book.«, or - if translated to German: »Ich lese gerade ein Buch« - there is available all needed information to do so.

Where can I download it?

There is nothing to download in the moment. Currently, the status of this project is »Planning«, which means, there is still nothing decided about how it should be achieved. Please contribute to this project, if you can, or ask other ppl to contribute, if you think, they could help the project. The most important think, what I need is people from different countries, including e.g. Chinese, Corean and so on. I want to get for each language at least one people, whose native language is that one. Only this can make sure, that the quality of generated test is on highest level for each language. I herein ask professors of all countries, who studied one or more languages to join this project.

How can I contribute?

Sourceforge provides Forums. There is the predefined Forum »Open Discussion«, there you should start to read articles already posted, or write new ones. The goal of this stage of the project is to specify the formal language to fit for all natural languages, and, of course, I don't expect the project to leave this stage in the next two years - at least for the case, that we want to make it well. Please write in English there, even if you aren't good in English. Better writing in bad English, which most people will understand, than writing in good Hebrew, what no one else understands ;-)

Milestones

This are the milestones for this project. This are not hard goals, but I want to develop the project reaching one of the milestones after the other in order.

  1. Define some pre-tbc abstract language and write an Proof Of Concept renderer for some »simple« languages like Englisch or German. We don't need to keep care about difficult languages like Chinese, here, which makes this PoC really simple compared to the final code we try to reach sometimes.
  2. Find at least on expert for each »important« natural language (whatever »important« means ...).
  3. Define the abstract language tbc in cooperation of the persons from above. Initial discussion about the language can start immediatelly, but final definition has to wait until all most popular languages are supported.
  4. Write full featured tbc renderers for each natural language.

Of course, I don't expect some useful result in the next years, but the Proof Of Concept code may be working in some month after I start coding it ...

I still have questions.

If you have any questions, then first, go to the »Open Discussion« Forum and read the posts there. If that doesn't answer your questions, decide if it's better posted in »Help« or in »Open Discussion«, and then, simply post it.