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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- 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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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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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-009-9051-z