Aspects of the Translation of English Subordinate Clauses into German

Stephan Mehl (Gerhard-Mercator-Universität - GH Duisburg)
Martin Volk (Universität Zürich)

In: Problems and Potential of English-to-German MT Systems. Workshop at the 8th International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation. TMI-99. Chester, England. August 1999.

Abstract

While many errors in machine translated texts are due to word sense ambiguity, syntactical transfer still poses problems, too. For a particular type of syntactic structure, namely, subordinate clauses, this paper distinguishes five kinds of translation difficulties: cross-language differences, syntactic ambiguity, functional ambiguity, stylistic preferences, and grammatical coverage.

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