Bilingual alignment and tense
Diana Santos · 1994
In this paper, I describe one annotation of tense transfer in parallel English and Portuguese texts. Even though the primary aim of the study is to compare the tense and aspect systems of the two languages, it also raises some questions as far as bilingual alignment in general is concerned. First, I present a detailed list of clausal mismatches, which shows that intra-sentential alignment is not an easy task. Subsequently, I present a detailed quantitative description of the translation pairs found and discuss some possible conclusions for the translation of tense. Finally, I discuss some theoretical problems related to translation. 1. Introduction Many people have recently suggested that aligned texts could be used for several NLP tasks such as automatic building of bilingual terminology, or machine translation (see the Call for Papers for this workshop). In this paper, I describe a study conducted on manually aligned bilingual corpora, at the clause level, annotated with respect to t...