Lexical Choice and Syntactic Generation in a Transfer System Transformations in the New LMT English-German System

Abstract

This paper argues that, contrary to received wisdom in the MT research community, a transfer system such as LMT is well suited to deal with most of the problems that MT faces. It may in fact be superior to other approaches in that it can handle target surface-structure constraints, variation of syntactic patterns, discourse-structure constraints, and stylistic preference. The paper describes the linguistic issues involved in LMT’s English⇒German transformational component, its interaction with the lexical transfer component, and types of transformations. It identifies context-dependent and context-independent transformations and among the context-dependent ones, it differentiates between those that are triggered by instructions in the lexicon, by semantic category, by syntactic context, and by setting of stylistic preference. The paper concludes with some examples of divergence between English and German and shows how LMT handles them.