Machine translation divergences: a formal description and proposed solution 论文

摘要

There are many cases in which the natural translation of one language into another esults in a very different form than that of the original. The existence of translation divergences (i.e., cross-linguistic distinctions) makes the straightforward transfer from source structures into target structures impractical. Many existing translation systems have mechanisms for handling diver-gent structures but do not provide a general procedure that takes advantage of the systematic relation between lexical-semantic structure and syntactic structure. This paper demonstrates that a systematic solution to the divergence problem can be derived from the formalization of two types of information: (1) the linguistically grounded classes upon which lexical-semantic divergences are based; and (2) the techniques by which lexical-semantic divergences are resolved. This formalization is advantageous in that it facilitates the design and implementation f the system, allows one to make an evaluation of the status of the system, and provides a basis for proving certain important properties about he system. 1.