Linguistic Modeling for Multilingual Machine Translation

26 CHAPTER 3. DIVERGENCES ACROSS LANGUAGES
(28f-g) are taken from [Vinay and Darbelnet58], pg.114 1 .
(28) a. German:
Er ist Lehrer.
he is teacher.
`He is a teacher'
b. Die Industrie ergreift Manahmen.
the industry is taking measures
`Industry is taking measures.'
c. Italian:
Mangio delle mele.
eat 1 of the apples
`I eat apples.'
d. In Italia si mangia la pasta.
in Italy one eats the pasta
`In Italy people eat pasta.'
e. French
L'usage du WC est interdit!
the use of the lavatory is forbidden
`Lavatory should not be used!'
f. Il a les yeux bleus.
he has the eyes red
He has red eyes.
g. Aux Etats-Unis l'essence co^ute 30 cents le gallon.
in United States the gasoline costs 30 cents the gallon
In the United States gasoline costs 30 cents a gallon.
3.2 Function Words vs. Axes
As an alternative to the use of function words, i.e. the use of syntactic markers
for functions, languages may use morphological markers: Negation may be
marked by prexes (29), determination may be marked in Bulgarian by a determiner
added to the rst inected element of the nominal projection (data from
[Guentcheva90] and [Walter and Kirjakova90]) and passive maybemarked by
suxes as in Russian:
(29) happy - unhappy
1 For the usage of the article in Arabic cf. [Harder and Schimmel89] pg.23.