FieldWorks consists of software tools that help you manage linguistic and cultural data. FieldWorks supports tasks ranging from the initial entry of collected data through to the preparation of data for publication, including:

• dictionary development
• interlinearization of texts
• cultural records
• bulk editing of many fields
• morphological analysis
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This program keeps track of phonetic data either typed directly in or drawn from one or more data sources (Toolbox, Fieldworks Language Explorer, Speech Analyzer files with transcriptions). If sound files are included in the source data, the user can listen to them directly in Phonology Assistant. PA has many analytical features, such as

• Creates a phone inventory
• Compares relative frequencies of phones
• Computes syllable structures
• Generates phonotactic charts for all combinations of positions, phones, or features
• Finds minimal pairs and/or phones contrasting in similar environments.

The user can search and manipulate the data in many useful ways, and the powerful search function allows the user to search for phonetic patterns within specified environments.

Data can be marked as uncertain if the transcription is in doubt, and uncertain data can optionally be marked in charts and wordlists.

Charts are flexible and allow columns and rows to be added or deleted, and phones can be placed where the user wants them to appear.  The following charts are available:

• All phones found.
• Histogram of the frequencies of phones
• Search all phonetic data items containing a particular phonetic segment, sorting preceding and following contexts from left to right or right to
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FLExTrans is a transfer-based machine translation system similar to CARLA that uses Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx) as a core component. A source text starts out in the source language’s FLEx project and ends up after the translation process in the target language’s FLEx Project. The basic steps are as follows:

1.Analyze the text in the source FLEx project.

2.Map lexical senses that are in the source text to senses in the target FLEx project (there’s a Sense Linker Tool to help with this).

3.Write transfer rules that convert source words and phrases to target words and phrases.

4.Run the six FLExTrans modules inside of FLExTools and you’re done.

FLExTrans in many ways is not a new piece of software, rather it glues together many great software packages that already exist. FLEx is at the core, but it also uses STAMP for synthesis and an open-source engine called Apertium for the transfer component. Apertium’s engine is very powerful and it's in Apertium’s transfer XML format that rules are written. I’ve templatized the format using the XMLMind XML Editor in a similar way to how XLingPaper does it. In this way you... Read more