TRANSLATING INTERACTIVE COMPUTER DIALOGUES FROM IDEOGRAPHIC TOALPHABETIC LANGUAGES
Abstract
A scheme is described which enables users
to interact with a timesharing computer in an
ideographic language such as Chinese. The host
computer runs a completely unmodified English based
operating system, the necessary translation being performed by a
preprocessing microcomputer which constitutes the ideographic
terminal. The two systems communicate through a
serial line, and the host sees the preprocessor
as an ordinary (English) terminal. Although the examples are
all drawn from Chinese, the scheme could equally well serve
other ideographic languages like Japanese and Korean.
After brief consideration of the terminal's keyboard and display, we
examine the software problems of translation for six example
subsystems - two interpreted programming languages, text editor,
document preparation system, interactive database management
system, and the command level of the operating system itself.
The investigation shows that few limitations need be placed on the
user's actions. For example, a suitable transliteration to alphabetics allows
ideographic filenames to be used and manipulated
quite naturally by operating system commands (which are themselves
transliterated). The same transliteration allows ideographic
text to be entered, edited, stored, displayed, and printed without
difficulty. If text to be altered is located and specified by context
(as is common with most modern text editors), rather than by character
offsets, the transliteration must be designed to yield unambiguous
pattern matching. Existing document preparation software can be
used for ideographic text, although there is a difficulty if
English and ideographics are interspersed within the same document. The
most difficult subsystem to handle is the BASIC language, with its baroque
syntax and non-contextual string matching operations: however, the paper
shows how suitable action by the preprocessor can overcome all problems
of standard BASIC except for operations which depend explicitly
on ASCII codes.
Description
Keywords
Computer Science