Domain Dependence of Lexical Translation: A Case Study of Patent Abstracts

The domain dependence of translations of nouns in English-to-Japanese patent translation is examined using an automatic method for identifying major translations from a pair of language corpora in the same domain. The method calculates the ratio of the number of associated words of a target word that suggest each translation of the target word to the total number of associated words. This ratio indicates how major a translation is in a domain. Application of the method to a bilingual patent-abstract corpus indicates the necessity and effectiveness of dividing the patent domain into subdomains and adapting a bilingual dictionary to subdomains.