A contrastive study of Chinese progressive aspect structure, "ZAI+verb" and its English correspondents: a bilingual parallel corpus-based perspective

Author

Qu, Yunhua ; Feng, Zhiwei

Author_Institution

Sch. of Int. Studies, Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou, China

fYear

2005

fDate

30 Oct.-1 Nov. 2005

Firstpage

307

Lastpage

311

Abstract

One of the Chinese-English machine translation burning problems is how to convert the Chinese aspects to their English correspondents. Chinese progressive aspect marker "ZAI+verb" can have multiple English correspondents besides the English progressive aspect. This paper takes an empirical approach to this unresolved conversion, based on a bilingual parallel corpus. It identifies 10 English translation equivalents of "ZAI+verb", figures out the conversion rates between "ZAI+verb" and its English translation equivalents, and presents 14 conversion rules to define the matching relationships between them. The results implies that the precise degree of Chinese-English machine translation of "ZAI+verb" to progressive aspects in English can be expected to be up to 67%.

Keywords

language translation; linguistics; natural languages; Chinese-English machine translation; ZAI+verb; aspect marker; bilingual parallel corpus; conversion rule; Chaos; Chaotic communication; Modems; Morphology; aspect marker "ZAI"; bilingual parallel corpus; conversion rate; conversion rule; progressive aspect;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering, 2005. IEEE NLP-KE '05. Proceedings of 2005 IEEE International Conference on

Print_ISBN

0-7803-9361-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/NLPKE.2005.1598753

Filename

1598753