Direct translation no complete intermediary sentence structure translation proceeds in a number of steps, each step dedicated to a specific task the most important component is the bilingual dictionary typically general language problems with –ambiguity –inflection –word order and other structural shifts

Simplistic approach sentence splitting tokenisation handling capital letters dictionary look-up and lexical substitution incl. some heuristics for handling ambiguities copying unknown words, digits, signs of punctuation etc. formal editing

Advanced classical approach (Tucker 1987) Source text dictionary look-up and morphological analysis Identification of homographs Identification of compound nouns Identification of nouns and verb phrases Processing of idioms

Advanced approach, cont. processing of prepositions subject-predicate identification syntactic ambiguity identification synthesis and morphological processing of target text rearrangement of words and phrases in target text

Feasibility of the direct translation strategy Is it possible to carry out the direct translation steps as suggested by Tucker with sufficient precision without relying on a complete sentence structure?

Assignment 1: manual direct translation Sv. Ytterst handlar kampen för sysselsättning om att hålla samman Sverige.  En. Ultimately, the fight for full employment concerns the cohesion of Swedish society. (from Statement of Government Policy 1996) Define an algorithm and a dictionary (based on Norstedts) for simplistic translation of the example. Present the model and the result.

Assignment 1, cont. Improve the result stepwise in accordance with the advanced direct translation strategy –Specify each step carefully and demonstrate its effect on the translation. Evaluate and discuss the final result. Translate the ex. using Systran ( and discuss the differences in an evaluative wayhttp://kwic.systran.fr/systran/svdemo Report the assignment and up-load on the web (041001)

Current trends in direct translation re-use of translations –translation memories of sentences and sub-sentence units such as words, phrases and larger units –lexicalistic translation –example-based translation –statistical translation Will re-use of translations overcome the problems with the direct translation approach that were discussed above? If so, how can they be handled?

Systran System Translation developed in the US by Peter Toma first version 1969 (Ru-En) EC bought the rights of Systran in 1976 currently 18 language pairs demo version sv-en in 2003 (

Systran, cont. more than 1,600,000 dictionary units 20 domain dictionaries daily use by EC translators, administrators of the European institutions originally a direct translation strategy –see H&S today more of a transfer-based strategy

Ex. 1: fairly good translation /Systran sv-en "Enskilda företagare som inte bildat bolag klassificeras hit." "Individual entrepreneurs that have not formed companies are classified here.” Systemet har känt igen bildat som en perfektform och översätter tempusformen korrekt have formed med negationen not på rätt plats.

Ex. 2: word order problem/ Systran sv-en "När byarna kontaktades hade de inte ens utsatts för influensa." "When the villages were contacted had they not even been exposed to flu.” Systemet har inte hittat subjekt och predikat och ger därför fel ordföljd.

Ex. 3: ambiguity problem/ Systran sv-en "Vad kan vi lära av Arrawetestammen?" "What can we faith of the Arawete?” Systemet hittar inte sambandet mellan kan och lära och ser därför inte att lära är ett verb.

Ex. 4: ambiguity problem/ Systran sv-en ”Extrapoleringen går till så här. " ”The extrapolation goes to so here.” Systemet känner inte till partikelverbet känna till och översätter därför felaktigt ord för ord.

Systran Linguistic Resources Dictionaries –POS Definitions –Inflection Tables –Decomposition Tables –Segmentation Dictionaries Disambiguation Rules Analysis Rules

Systran Processing Steps Analysis –Lookup –Compound Decomposition –Disambiguation –Syntactic Analysis –Compound Expansion Sentence Transfer –Initial Target Structure –Lookup –Default Transfer of Attributes –Structure Transformation

Systran Processing Steps (cont) Sentence Synthesis –Structure Transformation –Inflection lookup –Surface Transformation