Peeking through the language barrier: the development of a free/open-source gisting system for Basque to English based on apertium.org

Resumen

The article describes the development of a machine translation system from Basque to English designed for assimilation ('gisting') built on the free/open-source rule-based machine translation platform Apertium, and evaluates it preliminarly using a new method based in Cloze tests in which readers are asked to fill out gaps in a reference translation. The results indicate that the availability of the raw translations by a system with a dictionary of about 10000 entries and about 300 translation rules increase significantly the ability of readers to complete the tests successfully.