Issues in Translating Verb-Particle Constructions from German to English

نویسندگان

  • Nina Schottmüller
  • Joakim Nivre
چکیده

In this paper, we investigate difficulties in translating verb-particle constructions from German to English. We analyse the structure of German VPCs and compare them to VPCs in English. In order to find out if and to what degree the presence of VPCs causes problems for statistical machine translation systems, we collected a set of 59 verb pairs, each consisting of a German VPC and a synonymous simplex verb. With this data, we constructed 118 sentences in which the simplex verb and VPC are completely substitutable and translated the resulting dataset to English using Google Translate and Bing Translator. Through an analysis of the resulting translations we are able show that quality of the results decreases when translating sentences that contain VPCs instead of simplex verbs, in particular if they are separated from the verb root.

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تاریخ انتشار 2014