Multiple-Subject Constructions in the Multilingual MT-System CAT2

Abstract

This paper addresses the problems of the so-called ‘Multiple-Subject Constructions’ in Korean-to-English and Korean-to-German MT. They are often encountered in a dialogue, so that they must be especially taken into account in designing a spoken-language translation system. They do not only raise questions about their syntactic and semantic nature but also cause such problems as structural changes in the MT. The proper treatment of these constructions is also of importance in constructing a multilingual MT-System, because they are one of the major characteristics which distinguish the so-called ‘topic-oriented’ languages such as Korean and Japanese from the ‘subject-oriented’ languages such as English and German. In this paper we employ linguistic knowledge such as subcategorization, linear precedence and lexical functions for the analysis and the transfer of the constructions of this sort. Using the proposed methods, the specific transfer-rules for each language pair can be avoided.