A Prototype English-Japanese Machine Translation System for Translating IBM Computer Manuals

A Prototype English-Japanese Machine Translation System for Translating IBM Computer Manuals TaiJiro Tsutsumi Natural Language Processing Science Institute, IBM Japan, Ltd. 5-19, Sanban-cho, Chlyoda-ku Tokyo 102, Japan ABSTRACT This paper describes a prototype English-Japanese machine translation (MT) system developed at the Sci- ence Institute of IBM Japan, Ltd. This MT system cur- rently aims at the translation of IBM computer manuals. It is based on a transfer approach in which the transfer phase is divided into two sub-phases: English transfor- mation and Engllsh-Japanese conversion. An outline of the system and a detailed description of the English-Japanese transfer method are presented. I. Introduction The Science Institute of IBM Japan, Ltd. has been involved in Engllsh-Japanese machine translation for four years (I). We have developed a prototype capable of translating IBM computer manuals into Japanese. This system is based on a transfer approach in which the transfer process consists of English transformation and English-Japanese conversion. This MT system aims at I) high-quality translation; 2) an easily maintained transfer component; and 3) a smaller English-Japanese terminology dictionary. The transformation rules and the conversion rules are presently being constrBcted through tests using the IBM manual "VM/SP General Information" (60P). We are focusing on translation of IBM computer manu- als for 3 reasons: I) high-quality translation is expected in a limited area; 2) English IBM manuals are presumably written as clearly as possible according to an IBM internal standard; 3) we already had a practical Engllsh-Japanese terminology dictionary for human translators. Most MT systems developed in Europe and the U.S. deal with language pairs in the Indo-European language group (2). In the case of English-Japanese translation, since both languages are categorized in different lan- guage groups, a more powerful linguistic mechanism must be implemented. For instance, word order and sentence style are different and moreover an English word some- times corresponds to more than one Japanese equivalent. To overcome these difficulties, an English-Japanese or Japanese-English MT system might he based on a transfer or interlingua approach with a wide range of tree-transduclng Capabilities and a semantic processing mechanism. 2. Overview of the s s ~ Fig. i shows the overall translation process. First of all, an English sentence is syntactically analysed in the English analysis phase. The output of this analy- sis is one or more English parse trees. Second, in the Engllsh-Japanese transfer phase, an English parse tree, or an English intermediate representation, is trans- ferred to a corresponding Japanese tree, or a Japanese intermediate representation. During this transfer, an English parse tree is at first transformed by the transformation component to an English tree in Japanese-like style, and this result is converted to a Japanese tree by the English-Japanese conversion compo- nent. 646 An English Sentence I I English Analysis ] I English Intermediate Representation <English Analysis Tree(s)> I English-Japanese Transfer [ English Transformation ] English-Japanese Conversion] I Japanese Intermediate Representation <A Japanese tree> f Japanese Sentence(s) Fig. 1. Overall translation process Finally, in the Japanese generation phase, one or more Japanese sentences …

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