Translating emphatic/contrastive focus from English to Mandarin Chinese

Translating Emphatic/Contrastive Focus from English to Mandarin Chinese Chen-li Kuo, Allan Ramsay School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK C.Kuo-2@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk, Allan.Ramsay@manchester.ac.uk Abstract. This paper concerns the translation of spoken English into Mandarin Chinese, paying particular attention to the emphatic/contrastive focus in WH- questions which is realised by means of phonological stress in spoken English but by lexical and syntactic devices in Mandarin. A translation framework which is capable of treating emphatic/contrastive focus is outlined. 1 Introduction The linguistic meanings of intonation are often ignored by spoken machine translation systems despite the fact that intonation plays an important role in spoken languages. The contrast between a translation pair like English and Mandarin is particularly interesting because the level of dependence on intonation is different: functions associated with intonation in English are often replaced by morphological, lexical or syntactic devices in tone languages such as Mandarin. This paper concentrates on the translation of emphatic/contrastive focus between the two languages. Vermobil [1] and SLT [2] are the only two machine translation projects that have taken phonologically marked focus into account. Neither of these projects investigates the effect of emphatic/contrastive focus toward alternative translations in great depth. Nonetheless, there is a considerable amount of research into emphatic/contrastive focus in purely linguistic studies. The current work aims to incorporate this theoretical work into a working machine translation system. In Section 2, a translation framework which is able to treat emphatic/contrastive focus translation is outlined. This framework includes mechanisms which parse English sentences with a focus marker, transfer English trees to Mandarin trees, applies focus rules and generates the final Mandarin sentences. Section 3 discusses emphatic/contrastive focus constructions in Mandarin and English based on previous linguistic studies. Section 4 outlines the focus rules that can be used in the translation framework proposed in Section 2. Finally, Section 5 is about testing and evaluation. In this paper, only those sentences with one unambiguous emphatic/contrastive focus will be discussed. We also make a distinction between two kinds of phonological stress in English. When a phonological stress is on the WH-word in a WH-question, there might be two interpretations: emphatic/contrastive focus or an echo question. The first interpretation obtains when the speaker explicitly asks for a specific piece of information. Conversation (1) is an example. The second 12th EAMT conference, 22-23 September 2008, Hamburg, Germany 78 interpretation obtains when the speaker forgets what has been answered or is surprised by what the addressee has answered. Conversation (2) is an example. (1) Q: When did you stop smoking? A: I don’t smoke anymore. Q: WHEN did you stop smoking? (2) Q: How old are you? A: I am two centuries old. Q: HOW old are you? In the latter situation, the form of pitch contour on the word and on the rest of the utterance will be distinct from the pitch contours of the former situation. Only the translation of the former interpretation will be discussed in this paper. 2 The Framework of Translation The translation …

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