PRODUCTS

Names of people, places and organizations are often the most important information contained within a document. Getting the correct English spelling of names written in non-English documents is difficult because of:

• Complex rules for transliteration (writing a non-Latin script word in Roman letters)
• Cases where common or standard practice has superseded the “computationally correct” transliterated version
• Ambiguities in the way the name is written in the original language (e.g., partial reference or vocalization in Arabic)

The Rosette Name Translator (RNT) focuses on doing name translation as accurately as possible, avoiding the confusion that full machine translation encounters when looking at ambiguous sentences and paragraphs. It can be used to enhance the results of automatic machine translation systems, which may mistranslate names when they are composed of common words.

For example, the word (Salim or Saleem in Arabic) means “sound” or “correct” when used as a common noun, but when it is used as a name it is spelled “Salim."

How it works

Rosette Name Translator combines two functions -- name look up and name transliteration -- to find the most accurate english translation of a name.

First, the foreign name is looked up in user-supplied name dictionairies. If it is not found there, RNT then transliterates the name into the Roman alphabet using the applicable standard algorithm.

RNT includes a sample gazetteer with common foreign place names and their standard translation.