PhD thesis - School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh

Chapter 6. Other Potential Applications 167
GERMAN: Mit diesem Tool können Sie parallel in sämtlichen News
suchen.
ENGLISH(BABELFISH): With this Tool you can search parallel in all news.
FRENCH(BABELFISH): Avec ce Tool, vous pouvez chercher parallèlement tous les
News dans.
While it was established in Sections 2.1.3.2 and 4.2 that French contains a large
number of anglicisms at least in the domain of IT, the use of such anglicisms may,
however, not always be the preferred choice by a human translator (HT). They may
produce the following French translation of the German sentence:
FRENCH(HT): Avec cet outil, vous pouvez chercher tous les actualités en parallèle.
Mixed-lingual compounds or interlingual homographs are even more of a challenge
to MT systems. One very interesting example occurs in the following German query: 10
GERMAN: Nenne einen Grund für Selbstmord bei Teenagern.
ENGLISH(BABELFISH): Call a reason for suicide with dte rodents.
FRENCH(BABELFISH): cite une raison de suicide avec des Teenagern.
The English inclusion Teenager appears in the dative plural and consequently re-
ceives the German inflection n. Instead of treating this noun as an English inclusion
when translating the sentence into English, Babelfish processes this token as the Ger-
man compound Tee+Nagern (tea + rodents) and translates its subparts into the token
dte 11 and the noun rodents. Translating into French, the MT system treats the English
inclusion as unseen and inserts it directly into the translation without further process-
ing, such as inflection removal. Combined with a named entity recogniser, the English
inclusion classifier could signal to the MT engine which items require either translating
or transferring with respect to the target language.
Multi-word English inclusions also pose difficulty to most MT systems. If the
system has not encountered a particular expression in its training data or its lexicon,
it is likely to treat the entire expression as unseen. However, MT systems are not
necessarily aware of the boundaries of such multi-word expression as illustrated in
10This query appeared in CLEF 2004 where one of the tasks was to find answers to German question
in English documents (Ahn et al., 2004).
11Note that dte is not a typo but an error in the MT output.