Automatic program translation - a third way

Translation between data formats, between multimedia mark-up languages, between modelling languages and between programming languages are classic problems in computer science and software engineering. There are two traditional approaches to automatic translation, namely direct translation and translation via an intermediate language. The recent advent of extensible markup language (XML) and extensible stylesheet language transformations (XSLT) provides a practical means for facilitating direct translation with enhanced maintainability of both the generic translator (i.e., XSLT) and mapping specifications (i.e. stylesheets). In this paper, we propose a new approach to automatic translation, which replaces mapping stylesheets with individual stylesheets each corresponding to one specific language, and which utilises a generic translator to translate from one language to another based on their corresponding stylesheets. While this generic translator exhibits a centralised role in language translation, this approach does not require a "universal intermediate language". Instead, it employs a knowledge-based decision process and a mapping thesaurus to facilitate the transformation of data or program constructs from one language to another. We demonstrate the feasibility of this new approach with a case study of translating between graphical scene description languages, and report our implementation of a software environment for realising such a generic translator. We name this approach independent stylesheet language translation (ISLT), which, in terms of both concept and practice, represents a third way for automatic language translation.