Abstract
This paper addresses two types of mismatches in the translation of reported speech between German and English. The first mismatch is between the repeated use of the reported speech construction in English and the use of subjunctive in German used to indicate continued attribution. The second mismatch concerns the difference in usage of metonymic extensions in the subject position of reported speech. Examples show the different styles of reporting the utterances of somebody else. A well-structured lexicon is presented as one step to the solution of the problems presented. One key feature of the proposed lexicon is a meta-lexical organization of basic word entries, which is shown to facilitate the translation process. We contrast our notions of lexical structure with different recent proposals in machine translation.
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Bergler, S. Generative lexicon principles for machine translation: A case for meta-lexical structure. Mach Translat 9, 155–182 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00980577
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00980577