How Close Can We Get to the Ideal of Simple Transfer in Multi-lingual Machine Translation (MT)?

A bstract The ideal o f simple transfer aims at restricting transfer rules to the exchange of unstructured lexical entities— the terminal leaves in the tree structure that is output from monolingual analysis. All information that is not lexicalised in the source language is represented as features to be transferred unchanged to the target language. In E U RO TRA this ideal is approached through a centrally coordinated research within various phe­ nomena which are supposed to be of translational relevance, i.e. having lan­ guage specific surface manifestations. The outcome of this research ideally is to agree on a uniform treatment o f these phenomena across languages, thus leading to simple treinsfer. The paper makes a non-exhaustive overview over problems solved, problems under investigation, known but outstanding problems, and on this basis introduces a discussion of what will remain as unsolvable prob­ lems within an essentially sentence-based MT-system.