apertium1

Usage

Overview

apertium is the application that most people will be using as it simplifies the use of apertium/lt-toolbox tools for machine translation purposes.

This tool tries to ease the use of lt-toolbox (which contains all the lexical processing modules and tools) and apertium (which contains the rest of the engine) by providing a unique front-end to the end-user.

The different modules behind the apertium machine translation architecture are in order:

de-formatter

Separates the text to be translated from the format information.

morphological-analyser

Tokenizes the text in surface forms.

part-of-speech tagger

Chooses one surface forms among homographs.

lexical transfer module

Reads each source-language lexical form and delivers a corresponding target-language lexical form.

structural transfer module

Detects fixed-length patterns of lexical forms (chunks or phrases) needing special processing due to grammatical divergences between the two languages and performs the corresponding transformations.

morphological generator

Delivers a target-language surface form for each target-language lexical form, by suitably inflecting it.

post-generator

Performs orthographical operations such as contractions and apostrophations.

re-formatter

Restores the format information encapsulated by the de-formatter into the translated text and removes the encapsulation sequences used to protect certain characters in the source text.

Options

-d datadir

The directory holding the linguistic data. By default it will use the expected installation path.

language-pair

The language pair: LANG1–LANG2 (for instance “es-ca” or “ca-es”).

-f format

Specifies the format of the input and output files which can have these values:

txt

(default value) Input and output files are in text format.

html

Input and output files are in “html” format. This “html” is the one accepted by the vast majority of web browsers.

html-noent

Input and output files are in “html” format, but preserving native encoding characters rather than using HTML text entities.

rtf

Input and output files are in “rtf” format. The accepted “rtf” is the one generated by Microsoft WordPad and Microsoft Office up to and including Office 97.

-u

Disable marking of unknown words with the ‘*’ character.

-H

Enable header-detection (only used in some language pairs; will lead to stray ‘❡’ characters in pairs that don't support it).

-a

Enable marking of disambiguated words with the ‘=’ character.

Files

These are the two files that can be used with this command:

-m memory.tmx

use a translation memory to recycle translations

-o direction

translation direction using the translation memory, by default “direction” is used instead

-l

lists the available translation directions and exits direction typically, LANG1–LANG2, but see modes.xml in language data

infile

Input file (stdin by default).

outfile

Output file (stdout by default).