The aim of the Nordic SYMBERED project - funded by NUH (the Nordic Development Centre for Rehabilitation Technology) - is to develop a user friendly editing tool that makes use of concept coding to produce web pages with flexible graphical symbol support targeted towards people with Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) needs. Documents produced with the editing tool will be in XML/XHTML format, well suited for publishing on the Internet. These documents will then contain natural language text, such as Swedish or English. Some, or all, of the words in the text will be marked with a concept code defining its meaning. The coded words/concepts may then easily be represented by alternative kinds of graphical symbols and by additional text representations in alternative languages. Thus, within one web document created by the author with the SYMBERED tool, one symbol language can easily be swapped for another. This means that a Bliss and a PCS symbol user can each have his/her preferred kind of symbol support. The SYMBERED editing tool will initially support a limited vocabulary in four to five Nordic languages plus English, and three to four symbol systems, with built-in extensibility to cover more languages and symbol systems.

KUNSTI is the Norwegian national language technology programme, running 2001-2006 inclusive. The goal of the programme is to boost Norwegian language technology research. In this paper we describe the background, the objectives, the methodology applied in the management of the programme, the projects selected, and our first conclusions. We also describe national programmes form Sweden, France and Germany and compare objectives and methods.

Machine translation has proved itself to be easier between languages that are closely related, such as German and English, while far apart languages, such as Chinese and English, encounter much more problems. The present study focuses upon Swedish and Norwegian; two languages so closely related that they would be referred to as dialects if it were not for the fact that they had a Royal house and an army connected to each of them. Despite their similarity though, some differences make the translation phase much less straight-forward than what could be expected. Taking the outset in sentence aligned parallel texts, this study aims at highlighting some of the differences, and to formalise the results. In order to do so, the texts have been aligned on smaller units, by a simple cognate alignment method. Not at all surprising, the longer words were easier to align, while shorter and often high-frequent words became a problem. Also when trying to align to a specific word sense in a dictionary, content words rendered better results. Therefore, we abandoned the use of single-word units, and searched for multi-word units whenever possible. This study reinforces the view that Machine Translation should rest upon methods based on multiword unit searches.

Names can serve several purposes in the field of Machine Translation. The problems range from identifying to processing the various types of names. The paper begins with a short description of the search strategy and then continues with the classification of types into a typology. We present our findings according to degrees of translation from which we highlight clues. These clues indicate a first step towards formalization.