A New View on the Process of Translation

A NEW VIEW ON THE PROCESS OF TRANSLATION John A. Bateman, Robert T. Kasper Information Sciences Institute University of Southern California 4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001 Marina del Rey, CA 90292 U.S.A. JSrg F. L. Schfitz, Erich H. Steiner Institut ffir Angewandte Informationsforschung An der Universit£t des Saarlandes Martin Luther Strafle 14 D-6600 Saarbrficken, FRG. Abstract In this paper we describe a framework for research into translation that draws on a combination of two existing and independently constructed technologies: an analysis component developed for German by the EUROTRA-D (ET-D) group of IAI and the genera- tion component developed for English by the Penman group at ISI. We present some of the linguistic impli- cations of the research and the promise it bears for furthering understanding of the translation process. 1 Introduction In this paper we describe a framework for research into translation that draws on a combination of two existing and independently constructed technologies: the analysis component developed for German by the EUROTRA-D (ET-D) group of IAI and the genera- tion component developed for English by the Penman group at ISI. We have described some of the motiva- tions for and the basic organisation of the combined framework in Steiner and Sch~tz (1988) and Bateman, Kasper, Schfitz, and Steiner (1989). Here we present in more detail some of the linguistic implications of the research and the promise it bears for furthering understanding of the translation process. Although developed separately and for quite dif- ferent reasons, there is a decisive link between the two components in that ideas from a single linguistic theory, systemic-functional linguistics (e.g. Halliday, 1985) have been incorporated independently in both projects. A partial implementation of the grammat- ical stratum of organisation found in Systemic Func- tional Grammar (SFG) provides the core of Penman's linguistic capabilities (Mann and Matthiessen, 1985), whereas there is a strong input from SFG in the se- mantic interpretation of ET-D's dependency struc- tures (Steiner, Schmidt and Zelinsky-Wibbelt, 1988). It is therefore also one of the motivations of this co- operation to investigate the potential of SFG as a tool for transfer in machine translation MT, and in the wider context of systemic-functional linguistics also as a theoretical environment and as a formalism for ex- pressing semantics. This should be of interest to a wider audience within computational linguistics, espe- cially as SFG has recently been attracting an increas- ing amount of interest in the field (see, e.g.: Houghton and Isard, 1987; Kasper, 1988; Patten, 1988; Patten and Ritchie, 1987; Mellish, 1988; Paris and Bateman, 1989). 2 The projects involved 2.1 Eurotra-D Analysis Module The German analysis module of our proposed MT sys- tem is based on the Eurotra Engineering Framework (Bech and Nygaard, 1988) enhanced by a semantic component derived from systemic theory. 1 The gen- eral Eurdtra philosophy for translation is described elsewhere (Arnold et al., 1986, 1987). The essentials of the Eurotra-D approach are to be found in Steiner, Schmidt, and Zelinsky-Wibbelt (1988). The Eurotra system is a transfer-based multi-lingual MT-system. …

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