Controlled Language in Machine Translation
HU Qingpin · Chinese Science & Technology Translators Journal · 2005
Some linguists have created controlled language whose grammar and vocabulary are restricted in order to solve the problem of readability of handbooks for human readers and to eliminate the complexity of corpora for machine translation. Machine translation plus controlled language is called controlled translation. Although a dozen of Chinese English MT systems have been in use in China and abroad now, there are common shortcomings in all of them. The imperfections are resulted from the characteristics of Chinese as well as that of English. The biggest problem is that one Chinese word corresponds to many English words, and vice versa. This problem, the author suggests, should be solved by reducing the number of equivalent English words to only one as is done successfully on other pairs of languages, and by giving only one Chinese translation of a word newly borrowed from English, with the technique of semantic transliteration rather than free translation. The first step toward controlled translation is to compile a common dictionary for technical translation, which is characterized with one Chinese word for one English word. Besides, the author puts forward proposals for overcoming other difficulties unique to Chinese.