Glossary
Atomic Predicate
A predicate that is not a combination of other predicates.
BabelCode
The name of the meta-language used to write language definition files.
BabelScript
The name of the artificial source language used to express text prior to translation. The primary design goal of BabelScript is to avoid ambiguities which would make translation more difficult.
Compound Predicate
A predicate that is a combination of other predicates.
libbabel
The name of the shared library which implements the translation system.
Predicate
The basic unit of the artificial language BabelScript that is used to express the source text. Most correspond to abstract or concrete properties such as being green, or being virtuous, or being a duck-billed platypus. They behave as functions, and can act on each other to form new predicates.
Project Babel
The name of this project, the aim of which is to develop an Open Source machine translation system which can automatically but accurately generate text in many different languages.
Reading
The association between a word or collocation and its meaning. The reading will specify the part of speech for which it is applicable, and may be restricted to a particular context (such as biology or law). A given word or collocation may have multiple readings for the same and/or different parts of speech.
Source Text
The text to be translated, expressed as BabelScript.
Tag
An attribute which may be added to a predicate in order to qualify it in some way. There is no value associated with a tag: it conveys information only by its presence or absence. Tags are very commonly used for specifying lexical and grammatical categories, however they may be used for any purpose provided they are uniquely named.
Target Language
The language into which the source text is to be translated.