English to Esperanto Translator

JOSEPH N. ANTAKI, and EDWARD F. KLEIN

The constructed language Esperanto was conceived as a universal second language for the world to use. Machine translation programs are very useful to people who wish to express their thoughts in a language they do not speak. An English to Esperanto translator would enable English speakers to enter the Esperanto speaking community and express their thoughts. It also aids in the learning of Esperanto, thus proliferating the language further. The English to Esperanto translator will accept a subset of English sentences as input, and produce the sentence
translated into Esperanto. To maximize value, the program will consider English idioms and their metaphorical meaning when translating, instead of translating all phrases literally.
The translator will classify each word of an English sentence by its part of speech. It will then group them into more general categories using English grammar rules, such as noun phrases and verb phrases. Finally, the translator understands the whole sentence at once. Using a set of Esperanto grammar rules, it will then perform the same operation in reverse to produce a grammatically correct string of Esperanto words expressing the same idea as the original English sentence. To find the Esperanto equivalent of an English word, the translator will reference a table of equivalent words between the two languages. If the translator detects an idiom, it will reference a table that stores idioms and their plain language equivalents, using the latter to perform translations. It is hoped that this project will increase English speakers’ knowledge and interest in Esperanto.