Towards machine translation of Russian aspect
Barbara Sonnenhauser, Robert Zangenfeind · Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) · 2014
One of the most intricate problems for machine translation are grammatical categories which are present in the source language but not in the target language.This problem is further complicated if the category in question is highly polysemous.Grammatical aspect in Russian is one example for such a category.On the categorical level, it has only approximate equivalents in non-Slavic languages (such as the progressive form in English).In addition, language-internally, its semantics and interpretation cannot be sufficiently captured with one specific characteristic feature.This paper aims at establishing a basis for the machine translation of the Russian aspect.To do so, the interaction of verb and aspect semantics has to be described in a systematic way.Moreover, the further lexical components contributing to the meaning computation have to be annotated for the aspectual information they provide.This allows for the formulation of rules for machine translation into target languages either lacking grammatical aspect or having a different aspect system.