Comparative Stylistics in an Integrated Machine Translation System
Author | : Keith Mah |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 91 |
Release | : 1991 |
Genre | : French language |
ISBN | : |
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Abstract: "Comparative stylistics is a subfield of stylistics that attempts to account for the differences in style between languages. Rules of comparative stylistics are commonly presented, in textbooks of translation, as 'rules of thumb', but if we hope to incorporate a knowledge of comparative stylistics into natural language understanding systems, we must take a more formal approach. In particular, we will develop a computational model of comparative stylistics for machine translation that could be used to guide translation and thereby improve the quality of the translated output. An implementation of this model would provide additional information to the machine translation system about the potential modulations to the translated text and their effects, enabling it to make a more informed decision. In this thesis, we develop a set of formal rules of syntactic French-English comparative stylistics to be used as a component of a model of comparative stylistics. As the foundation for the formal rules, we adapt theoretical rules of syntactic French-English comparative stylistics compiled by Guillemin-Flescher [1981] and the formal representation of syntactic style developed by DiMarco [1990]. A corpus of French sentences and their English translations is analyzed to convert the theoretical rules to a set of formal rules that builds on DiMarco's grammars of syntactic style. Thus, we present a formal grammar of French- English comparative stylistics. We also suggest a method for incorporating these rules into an existing machine translation system."