ALT-J/C: a prototype Japanese-to-Chinese automatic language translation system

ALT-J/C A Prototype Japanese-to-Chinese Automatic Language Translation System Minoru Hayashi, Setsuo Yamada, Akira Kataoka and Akio Yokoo NTT Communication Science Laboratories 2-4, Hikaridai, Seika-chou, Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-0237 Japan hayashi@cslab.kecl.ntt.co.jp Abstract This paper describes a prototype Japanese-to-Chinese automatic language translation system. ALT-J/C (Automatic Language Translator - Japanese-to-Chinese) is a semantic transfer based system, which is based on ALT-J/E (a Japanese-to-English system), but written to cope with Unicode. It is also designed to cope with constructions specific to Chinese. This system has the potential to become a framework for multilingual translation systems. 1 Introduction The history of telecommunications is the history of the expansion of information, and efforts to overcome the barrier of distance, overcome the barrier of time and overcome the barrier of language. To remove the barrier of language several automatic language translation systems have been developed. There are especially a lot of Native-to-English and English-to-Native translation systems that have been developed. Some multilingual translation systems also have been developed (Mitamura 1999, Fu 1999). But even now there are not so many translation systems that have been developed between Asian languages. There are a small number of Japanese- to-Chinese translation systems and Chinese-to-Japanese translation systems, but they are not of good quality. We began to develop a Japanese-to-Chinese automatic language translation system to contribute to a framework of multilingual translation systems. The Chinese language originates from the Han language incorporated with external linguistic factors. Chinese has more than 50,000 characters and has a complicated grammatical structure. The main reason for developing a Japanese-to-Chinese translation system is that we want to develop a system that has the potential to become a framework for multilingual translation systems developed from a Japanese-to-Chinese translation system. In addition, recently the number of potential users for such a Japanese- to-Chinese translation system has increased. In this study we handle Mandarin, a modern version of standard Chinese. In this paper we introduce ALT-J/C, a prototype Japanese-to-Chinese automatic language translation system that is a semantic transfer based system. The system implementation is rewritten to cope with Unicode based on the translation engine ALT-J/E (Ikehara et al. 1987, Ikehara et al. 1991), a Japanese-to-English system. ALT-J/E once has been extended to ALT-J/M (Ogura et al. 1999), a Japanese-to-Malay system. In this paper we further extend the system to handle Chinese. To do this we rewrote the system to cope with Unicode, as well as extended the translation system to cope with constructions specific to Chinese. In the next section we describe the translation method of ALT-J/C. Then we look at semantic dictionaries and structure dictionaries in sections 3 and 4. In section 5 we look at some examples of how the system translates. And then we discuss and summarize in sections 6 and 7. 2 Translation Method ALT-J/C uses a translation method based on the constructive process theory, in which grammar focuses attention on the speaker’s intention and recognition. This hierarchical translation method is based on semantic analysis and multi-level translation at appropriate granularity. The translation method is based …

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