The Relevance of Some Compiler Construction Techniques to the Description and Translation Of Languages

The framework is machine-translation. Compiler-building can for'a variety of reasons be considered as a special case of machine-translation. It is the purpose of this paper to explicate some techniques used in compiler-building, and to relate these to linguistic theory and to the practice of machine-translation. " The generally observed machine-translation procedure could be schernatized as in FIGURE 1, or to put it another way, le 2. 3. Parsing the source-text. Translation from source to object-language. Synthesis of gramrrmtically correct object-text. FIGURE 1. " breakdown , translation, and recomposition. The translation usually occurs on the level of some simplified, cannonical form (that is not necessarily the kernel-form) of both languages, such that the source-text is decomposed, and the object-text recomposed from this form. The translation algorithm usually requires a statement of the structure of both the source and the object-language, a.s well as the statemen~f some primitive-to-primitive