A Generic Tool for Creating and using Multilingual Phrasebooks

To speak fluently is a complex skill. If reaching this goal in one’s mother tongue is already quite a feat, to do so in a foreign language can be overwhelming. One way to overcome the expression problem when going abroad is to use a dictionary or a phrasebook. While neither of them ensures fluency, both of them are useful translation tools. Yet, neither can teach you to speak. We will show here how this can be done in the case of a phrasebook. Being interested in the learning of foreign languages, we have started to build a multilingual phrasebook (English, French, Japanese, Chinese) whose sentence elements, typically words or expressions, are clickable items. This fairly simple feature allows extending considerably the potential of the resource. Rather than learning merely a list of concrete instances (sentences), the user may learn in addition the underlying principles (patterns), that is, the generative mechanism capable to produce quickly analogous, but more or less different sentences. A similar feature may be used to extend the resource, by mining a corpus for sentences built according to the same principle, i.e. based on the same pattern, but this is work for the future. Two of the main goals of this paper are to present a method helping learners to acquire the skill of speaking (patterns augmented with rules), and to allow experts (teachers) to add information either to extend the database or to add a new language. We’ve started from English and Japanese, adding very quickly French and Chinese.