Direct translation

1
Direct translation

• no intermediary sentence structure
• translation proceeds in a number of steps, each
  step dedicated to a specific task
• the most important component is the bilingual
  dictionary
• typically general language
• problems with
• ambiguity
• inflection
• word order and other structural shifts

2
Simplistic approach

• sentence splitting
• tokenisation
• handling capital letters
• dictionary look-up and lexical substitution
• copying unknown words, digits, signs of
  punctuation etc.
• formal editing

3
Advanced classical approach (Tucker 1987)

• Source text dictionary lookups and morphological
  analysis
• Identification of homographs
• Identification of compound nouns
• Identification of nouns and verb phrases
• Processing of idioms

4
Advanced approach, cont.

• processing of prepositions
• subject-predicate identification
• syntactic ambiguity identification
• synthesis and morphological processing of target
  text
• rearrangement of words and phrases in target text

5
Feasibility of the direct translation strategy

• Is it possible to carry out the direct
  translation steps as suggested by Tucker with
  sufficient precision without relying on a
  sentence grammar and an intermediary structure?

6
Example, 1

• Sv. Ytterst handlar kampen för sysselsättning om
  att hålla samman Sverige.
• En. Ultimately, the fight for full employment
  concerns the cohesion of Swedish society.
• (from Statement of Government Policy 1996)

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Assignment 1 Hable Con Ella (en-sv)

• Make a general quality assessment of the
  translation.
• Suggest a possible use of a translation of this
  kind.
• Identify the steps that were taken in the
  translation.
• Specify the translation errors that were made and
  discuss them.
• Suggest improvements in the framework of the
  direct translation strategy.
• Motivate them.
• Formalise them in a framework of your own choice.
• Discuss their general adequacy in the translation
  of Swedish to English.

8
Current trends in direct translation

• re-use of translations
• translation memories of sentences and
  sub-sentence units such as words, phrases and
  larger units
• example-based translation
• statistical translation
• Will re-use of translations overcome the problems
  with the direct translation approach that were
  discussed above?
• If so, how can they be handled?

9
Systran

• System Translation
• developped in the US by Peter Toma
• first version 1969 (Ru-En)
• EC bought the rights of Systran in 1976
• currently 18 language pairs
• no Swedish
• http//babelfish.altavista.com/)

10
Systran, cont.

• more than 1,600,000 dictionary units
• 20 domain dictionaries
• daily use by EC translators, administrators of
  the European institutions
• originally a direct translation strategy
• see HS
• to-day more of a transfer-based strategy

11
Motivations for transfer-based translation

• lexical ambiguity
• structural differences
• See further Ingo 91 (6), Wikholm (89)

12
Example, 2

• Sv. Fyll på olja i växellådan. ?
• En. Fill gearbox with oil.
• (from the Scania corpus)
• fyll på ? fill
• obj ? adv
• adv ? obj

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Example, 3

• Sv. I oljefilterhållaren sitter en
  överströmningsventil. ?
• En. The oil filter retainer has an overflow
  valve.
• (from the Scania corpus)
• sitter ? has
• adv ? subj
• subj ? obj