Prospects for Computer Assisted Dialect Adaptation

This paper describes a project which has explored the feasibility of using a computer to perform a significant portion of the changes required to adapt text from one dialect to several others. This ongoing experiment has examined adaptation between various dialects of Quechua, finding that a computer program may be an important tool for adaptation. An experimental computer program was written and applied to text, and its output was field tested in five target dialects. Preliminary results indicate that preprocessing text with a computer may I) enable informants who are not bi-dialectical (in the source and target dialects) to produce adequate adaptations without much coaching from the linguist/translator; 2) improve the quality of the resulting text; and 3) reduce time and effortmboth in adaptation and in manuscript preparation.