Carabao (full name: Carabao Do-It-Yourself Machine Translation Kit) is a completely open machine translation toolkit. It allows creation of your own machine translation interlingua-modeled databases and using them on-the-fly. Unique capabilities of Carabao and effective data entry allow using it as a testbed for linguistic models and creation of specialized dictionaries.

Features include:

• Faster and more nuance-tolerant word entry.
• Style sensitivity and control - ability to reshape the result so it will bear the same meaning but in different style. For example, the user may write a phrase using common words in French, and the program would translate it into official style in English.
• Model and entities are grammar-independent and are suitable for any language without the need to reprogram or even recompile. Lexical data is stored in transactional database.
• Interlingual approach to storing lexical data.
• Descriptive mini-language for collocations, rules and idioms that allows effective handling of lexical holes.
• Inline conversion of measures.
• Built-in customized instant dictionary printing capability.
• Built-in thesaurus for words and idioms found in the processed text.
• Ability to trace the translation process.

Carabao architecture and general concepts are somewhat similar to architecture of Ariane system created by Vauquois & Boitet in 1985. (Although during Carabao´s creation the author didn´t know that.) Hopefully it will take off from the point where Ariane stopped because of the untimely death of Bernard Vauqois (ambitious, I know).