Lingvistica is developing a family of MT systems for Dutch to and from English, German, and French. PARS/H, a Dutch to and from English system, is a fully commercial product, while PARS/HD, for Dutch to and from German MT, and PARS/HF, for Dutch to and from French, are under way. The PARS/Dutch family of MT systems is based on the rule-based Lingvistica’s Dutch morphological-syntactic analyzer and synthesizer dealing with vowel and consonant alterations in Dutch words, as well as Dutch syntactic analysis and synthesis. Besides, a German analyzer and synthesizer have been developed, and a similar French one is being constructed. Representative Dutch and German grammatical dictionaries have been created, comprising Dutch and German words and their complete morphological descriptions: class and subclass characteristics, alteration features, and morphological declension/conjugation paradigms. The PARS/H dictionary editor provides simple dictionary updating. Numerous specialist dictionaries are being and have been created. The user interface integrates PARS/H with MS Word and MS Internet Explorer, fully preserving the corresponding formats. Integrating with MS Excel and many other applications is under way.

This paper presents a description of the well-known family of machine translation systems, PARS. PARS was developed in the USSR as long ago as in 1989, and, since then, it has passed a difficult way from a mainframe-based, somewhat bulky system to a modern PC-oriented product. At the same time, we understand but well that, as any machine translation software, PARS is not artificial intelligence, and it is only capable of generating what is called “draft translation”. It is certainly useful, but can by no means be considered a kind of substitution for a human translator whenever high-quality translation is required.

The paper shows the history of developing the PARS family of commercial machine translation systems for Russian, Ukrainian, English, and German, developed by Lingvistica '98 Inc. It discusses three aspects: retrospective, technological, and linguistic The main focus is on dictionary updating as one of the most important components of a commercial MT product. Each of the PARS systems features a unique tagging option, which makes it possible for the user to have grammatical data assigned automatically to Russian and Ukrainian words entered into the dictionaries. Besides, PARS dictionary officers make use of the batch-mode tagging technology, due to which PARS features very large bidirectional Russian-English general and specialist dictionaries of more than 1,000,000 translations for each translation direction, as well as large bidirectional Ukrainian-English professional dictionaries. The PARS family was designed in the mid 1980s, and it has been and is now in commercial use since 1989 all over the world.

The paper presents a new development by Lingvistica ‘98 Inc.: the PG-PARS computer-assisted translation system and a series of professional bidirectional dictionaries. PG-PARS was designed as a Windows 95 and Windows 98 application to support English-Russian-English and English-Ukrainian-English dictionaries. PG-PARS dictionaries are all bidirectional, i.e. they include, for example, both the English-Russian and Russian-English parts. Each part has its alphabetical index of entries displayed on a separate tab in the PG-PARS main window. The word entries are displayed for both parts of the dictionary, and translations of translations can be found easily, which is useful for a professional translator. One of the main peculiarities of PG-PARS is the Smart search mode based on morphological analysis of Slavic and English words looked up in the dictionaries. This is especially beneficial if the user is not a native speaker of Russian and Ukrainian. Another important feature is the Selection option which allows the user to mark a portion of the dictionary entry and paste it into the text. The presentation will show professional applications of the PG-PARS system for translating Russian and English texts.

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.