Flummoxed by a document in Welsh? Now you can get a free translation at cymraeg.org.uk. The Apertium-cy software, described as the first free automatic translator from Welsh to English, is the fruit of a multilingual effort involving developers in Spain, Wales and Ireland pushing forward the possibilities of open-source software and, they hope, free public-sector data.

Apertium-cy is the first non-Romance language to be available on Apertium, a machine-translation platform developed by the Transducens research group at the University of Alicante and a spin-off, Prompsit Language Engineering. It already offers 14 pairs of languages, plus the possibility of creating translators for new combinations.

Work on the Welsh-language version was led by Francis Tyers and Kevin Donnelly. It contains about 10,000 words in Welsh and English and 150 grammatical rules - enough to get the gist of the text, the developers say. The idea is to provide an easy way for people who don't speak Welsh to keep an eye on Welsh-language media reports in an area of interest, and to provide a "first-pass" translation of documents, improving the productivity of human translators.

Open source is important to the project because it enables a community of users continuously to improve the software.

So far, so good. However the developers are worried that the next stage of the project might involve re-inventing the wheel, in the shape of a list of modern Welsh words. Such lists already exist, compiled by the government-funded Welsh Language Board, but Donnelly says that the licensing terms look daunting.

"It says you can only download for use on a single PC, or a single network," he says. He worries that the team may now have to compile its own dictionary. "It seems a little pointless when the Welsh Language Board has already paid to have it done, and has a mission to disseminate it as widely as possible." Ironically, the developers got hold of their English word list from an official database in Spain.

When we contacted the Welsh Language Board, however, it said the Apertium team couldn't be more wrong. "We welcome re-use," it said. Although the small print forbids unauthorised reproduction, the board says it would be delighted to consider requests. Where feasible, it will make products available under what it says would be "a suitable free non-commercial agreement".

That looks like good news, and reflects growing international practice. The European Commission, for example, has promised to make its translation database, which contains 1m in 23 different language combinations, available for re-use. We wonder if the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has its own linguistic treasure chest, just waiting to be opened.

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