Constructing Parallel Corpus from Movie Subtitles

This paper describes a methodology for constructing aligned German-Chinese corpora from movie subtitles. The corpora will be used to train a special machine translation system with intention to automatically translate the subtitles between German and Chinese. Since the common length-based algorithm for alignment shows weakness on short spoken sentences, especially on those from different language families, this paper studies to use dynamic programming based on time-shift information in subtitles, and extends it with statistical lexical cues to align the subtitle. In our experiment with around 4,000 Chinese and German sentences, the proposed alignment approach yields 83.8% precision. Furthermore, it is unrelated to languages, and leads to a general method of parallel corpora building between different language families.