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Morphological mismatches in machine translation

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Machine Translation

Abstract

This paper addresses one of the least studied, although very important, problems of machine translation—the problem of morphological mismatches between languages and their handling during transfer. The level at which we assume transfer to be carried out is the Deep-Syntactic Structure (DSyntS) as proposed in the Meaning-Text Theory. DSyntS is abstract enough to avoid all types of surface morphological divergences. For the remaining ‘genuine’ divergences between grammatical significations, we propose a morphological transfer model. To illustrate this model, we apply it to the transfer of grammemes of definiteness and aspect for the language pair Russian–German and German–Russian, respectively.

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Abbreviations

BI:

Bilingual index

DSyntA:

Deep-syntactic actant

DSynt-CommS:

Deep-syntactic communicative structure

DSyntS:

Deep-syntactic structure

d:

A particular derivateme

ECD:

Explanatory combinatorial dictionary

g:

A particular grammeme

GS:

Grammatical signification

L:

A particular lexeme

\({{\mathcal L}}\) :

A particular language

LF:

Lexical function

LU:

Lexical unit

MT:

Machine translation

MTT:

Meaning-Text Theory

SAE:

Standard Average European (language)

SSyntS:

Surface-syntactic structure

X S /X T :

Source/target X (with X being an LU, \({{\mathcal L}}\) , ...)–Lexical units are in CAPITALS; in the text, grammatical significations are in small capitals and ‘single quotes’; (quasi-)grammemes, when encoded as subscripts to LUs, are in small capitals without quotes. Linguistic examples are in ordinary italics; meanings, including glosses, are in ‘single quotes’.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics and Translation, University of Montreal, C.P. 6128 “Centre-Ville”, Montreal, QC, H3C 3J7, Canada

    Igor Mel’čuk

  2. Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Pompeu Fabra University, C. Roc Boronat, 138, 08018, Barcelona, Spain

    Leo Wanner

  3. Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), 08010, Barcelona, Spain

    Leo Wanner

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  1. Igor Mel’čuk
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  2. Leo Wanner
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Correspondence to Igor Mel’čuk.

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Mel’čuk, I., Wanner, L. Morphological mismatches in machine translation. Machine Translation 22, 101–152 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-009-9051-z

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