Pars/u for Windows: the World's First Commercial English-ukrainian and Ukrainian-english Machine Translation System

The paper describes the PARS/U Ukrainian-English bidirectional MT system by Lingvistica '93 Co. PARS/U translates MS Word and HTML files as well as screen Helps. It features an easy-to-master dictionary updating program, which permits the user to customize the system by means of running subject-area oriented texts through the MT engine. PARS/U is marketed in Ukraine and North America. 1. Background Ukrainian is the state language in Ukraine, the second largest republic in the former Soviet Union. The country gained its independence in 1991. Before that, Russian had been mainly used in science, technology, business, and other branches of socio-economic life in Ukraine. At the same time, Ukrainian is the language of a very rich culture of European orientation, and it's only natural that Ukrainians want to revive it after a long period of a certain stagnation. The difficulties are obvious: lack of dictionaries and standardized terminology. We are deeply convinced that it is impossible to solve this task without including Ukrainian in the orbit of language engineering. The first Ukrainian-based machine translation engine developed in Ukraine was RUMP, a RussianUkrainian bidirectional system by Lingvistica '93 Co. We started marketing it as early as in 1990. RUMP runs on dozens of hundreds of computers in Ukraine. Inspired with the success, we developed a system for translating between Ukrainian and English. 2. Lexicography The first problem to be solved was of lexicographic nature. We developed a bidirectional EnglishUkrainian basic dictionary of 35,000 words and phrases, which contains not only general-usage, but also some business terms. When compiling the dictionary, we made use of some English and EnglishUkrainian printed dictionaries, and we have also run numerous original texts through PARS/U to enlarge the dictionary. We are also developing terminological dictionaries for PARS/U. Our company makes agreements with leading Ukrainian lexicographers to convert their dictionaries into PARS/U data bases. The dictionaries are automatically made bidirectional, English-Ukrainian-English. A dictionary of 20,000 computer terms has been compiled, based on the English-Ukrainian dictionary by Dr.O.Kossak. The other specialist dictionaries for PARS/U are ecological, by Prof.V.Lozansky,