Dialectal Machine Translation A Case Study

Résumé: Traditional grammarians are well-known for their clear standing position against the spoken form of language. Primacy was, at their time, orientated towards writing which was believed to represent, unlike speech, the pure and correct version of language. Their attitude was previously greatly influential. It was until the advent of structural linguistics that language scholars started to claim the significance of studying the spoken form. Speech was recognised as an autonomous object of investigation, but not its variation. First linguists devoted their attention to stable linguistic features and neglected those which vary. Variability meant for them disorder and chaos. Language variation has however started to gain meditation since sociolinguistics appeared. That language variation is systematic and worth exploring has been realised gradually. Today, sociolinguists hold against any kind of variable form marginalisation. Needless to say that the most salient language variation is regional and lexical. One objective of sociolinguists is to promote the spoken varieties or dialects, and provide them with the necessary tools already supplied to the written form of language. Cooperation between language scholars and computer scientists can turn automatic translation possible to any dialectal variety. Given that dialects are particularly exposed to lexical variation, the question which arises here: into which item is the computer supposed to translate? Our choice has fallen on Oran Arabic. In this paper, we will attempt to find an answer to this question on fieldwork bases.

Publié dans la revue: Revue Maghrébine des Langues