Some Notes on Russian Predicative Infinitives in Automatic Translation
Henrik Birnbaum · 1967
Some considerations are presented regarding certain aspects of automatically translating Russian predicative infinitives into English. Emphasis is placed on the analysis (decoding) of the pertinent infinitive constructions in the source language rather than on the synthesis (encoding) of their equivalents in the target language. The paper does not aim at an exhaustive treatment of the problem, but merely offers some tentative and peripheral suggestions as well as some criticism of previous endeavors to tackle the problem of Russian predicative infinitives in machine translation. The following remarks and suggestions are by no means offered as an exhaustive treatment of the problem of manipulating predicative infinitive occurrences in Russian-English machine translation, or even of some particular fraction of that problem. What follows is rather a tentative contribution to a discussion in progress apt, at best, to offer some additional angles or perhaps to