People who are afraid of the dense characters on the Internet because of the language barrier will be shocked by the news that a project called UNL will realize the online automatic translation of 1998 13 language. By the end of this century, even if you only know your own language, you can talk in hundreds of different languages online.
According to experts, the existing Internet is a network with English as the dominant language. How to make people in non-English-speaking countries enjoy the same services as people in English-speaking countries by using local languages, break the language barriers in people's communication in various countries, and transform the existing network environment dominated by a single language into a network suitable for multiple languages and cultures has become increasingly prominent and urgent.
19951In February 1995, the United Nations Standing Council adopted a historic proposal-UNL project led by the Institute of Advanced Studies of the United Nations University, which was officially launched in the second half of 1996. The full name of UNL is Universal Network Language. The main goal of this project is to build an infrastructure for countries around the world to overcome language barriers and achieve multilingual communication within ten years.
The first languages developed by UNL project are 13, all of which are major languages with a population of over 1 100 million, including the six working languages of the United Nations (Note 2). China is the first country visited by a UNU UNL delegation. At present, experts from the Computer and Microelectronics Development Research Center of the Ministry of Electronic Industry have participated in the research and development of this project. The concrete steps are: developing 1 and 100000 Chinese dictionaries. 2. The relationship between Chinese Dictionary and UNL UL. 3. Use UNL specification to develop Chinese analysis and generation rules, and realize the conversion between Chinese and UNL in converters and generators.
The elimination of network language barriers will bring us into a global village where we can talk freely. It is undoubtedly a blessing that Chinese, with a world population of14 users, has become the beneficiary language of the first UNL project. Experts said that although Chinese is an ideographic language lacking morphological features, and semantic research is quite difficult, in recent years, the Ministry of Electronics has conducted in-depth research on the basic research and product development of Chinese information processing, which has created conditions for the smooth development of Chinese UNL project in China.
UNL is a universal network language project, which is organized and implemented by the United Nations University. Its scheme is to design an intermediate language-UNL language, and each language develops a set of software called "converter" and "inverse converter". One language is converted into UNL by a "converter" and then into another language by an "inverse converter", thus realizing the conversion between languages.
The UNL project is a cross-country, cross-language and cross-century huge project, which is expected to be completed within 10 years. The first phase of the project involves China, France, Japan, Italy, France, Russia, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Brazil, Spain, Mongolia and other 13 countries, and it takes three years to complete 65438+, including the six working languages of the United Nations. This means that 80% of the world's population will benefit from this project. The second phase of the project, from 1999 to 2005, will complete the language conversion and development of 185 countries belonging to the United Nations.