In this paper we describe a set of processes for the acquisition of re­sources for quick ramp­up machine translation (MT) from any language lacking significant machine tracta­ble resources into English, using the Paraguayan indigenous lan­guage Guarani as well as Amharic and Chechen, as examples. Our task is to develop a 250,000 mono­lingual corpus, a 250,000 bilingual parallel corpus, and smaller corpora tagged with part of speech, named entity, and morphological annota­tions.

ULTRA (Universal Language Translator) is a multi-lingua] bidirectional translation system between English, Spanish, German, Japanese and Chinese. It employs an interlingua] structure to translate among these five languages. An interlingual representation is used as a deep structure through which any pair of these languages can be translated in either direction. This paper describes some techniques used in the Chinese system to solve problems in word ordering, language equivalency, Chinese verb constituent and prepositional phrase attachment. By means of these techniques translation quality has been significantly improved. Heuristic search, which results in translation efficiency, is also discussed.