Russian verbal aspect and machine translation
Robert Zangenfeind, Barbara Sonnenhauser · Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) · 2014
Rule-based machine translation still offers some very beneficial facets for linguistic theory, because by implementing rules on the computer linguistic theory can be verified in practice.One of the most intricate problems for machine translation is grammatical aspect in Russian when it has to be translated into a language either lacking aspect or having a different aspect system.On the categorical level, aspect has only approximate equivalents in non-Slavic languages, such as the progressive form in English, for instance.In addition, languageinternally, its semantics and interpretation cannot be sufficiently captured with only one specific characteristic feature.In this paper, we aim at establishing a basis for the machine translation of the Russian aspect.To do so, we discuss an approach to describe the interaction of verb and aspect semantics in a systematic way.Moreover, we describe a possible annotation for the aspectual information that is provided by further lexical components contributing to the meaning computation.This allows for the formulation of rules for machine translation into target languages where the grammatical category of aspect is realized differently or not present at all.