A new view on the process of translation

Abstract

In this paper we describe a framework for research into translation that draws on a combination of two existing and independently constructed technologies: an analysis component developed for German by the EUROTRA-D (ET-D) group of IAI and the generation component developed for English by the Penman group at ISI. We present some of the linguistic implications of the research and the promise it bears for furthering understanding of the translation process.

Book reviews

“…I agree with G in his particular criticism here but would like to add that it would not be applicable to other functional approaches such as Hatim and Mason (1990), Bell (1991), or even the sketchy Bateman et al (1989). As before, so in the discussion of the translation of Morgenstern, G's notion of relevance is too unconstrained for me (p. 112), and I can see only a very weak sense in which "... the notion of importance alluded to here can be explained in terms of relevance" (p. 113).…”

Finding translation equivalents

“…Realizations of modality Consider the following translation pair (Schlitz, 1989), which is again problematic in a transfer-based fl'amework that relies on representations less abstract than that of the upper model and SPL because the structures are very different: (5) John is likely to implement the algorithm A ) John implementiert wahrseheinlich den lgorithmus (5) and 6both share a common SPL representation:…”

“…Following from earlier experiments in the integration of Machine Translation (MT) and text generation (Bateman, Kasper, Schlitz, and Steiner, 1989), we have found that the combination of two components of the Systemic-Functional Linguistic (SFL) model of language (Halliday, 1985;Matthiessen, 1987), such as are being developed for computational use within the PENMAN text generation system, significantly reduces tlhe need for structural transfer in machine translation (MT) without requiring deep modelling of specific domains. These two components may be described thus: ® a linguistically motivated organization of general semantic distinctions that are not highly language-specific and that hold across both differing domains and differing languages --this level of organization is realized computationally within the PENMAN system as the upper model; ® a particular class of mapping relations between this abstract semantic organization and linguistic form-these mappings are motivated by the notion of 'grammatical metaphor'.…”