Machine Translation Divergences: A Formal Description and Proposed Solution

There are many cases in which the natural translation of one language into another results in a very different form than that of the original. The existence of translation divergences (i.e., crosslinguistic distinctions) makes the straightforward transfer from source structures into target structures impractical. Many existing translation systems have mechanisms for handling divergent structures but do not provide a general procedure that takes advantage of the systematic relation between lexical-semantic structure and syntactic structure. This paper demonstrates that a systematic solution to the divergence problem can be derived from the formalization of two types of information: (1) the linguistically grounded classes upon which lexical-semantic divergences are based; and (2) the techniques by which lexical-semantic divergences are resolved. This formalization is advantageous in that it facilitates the design and implementation of the system, allows one to make an evaluation of the status of the system, and provides a basis for proving certain important properties about the system.