A method of terminology alignment in Historical Books based on the correspondence between Pivot language and position

Abstract

In view of the most difficult problem of terminology translation in the translation of historical books, this paper extracts term translation pairs from bilingual parallel corpus as a reference to improve the quality and efficiency of the translation of historical books. However, the small size of the corpus of historical books leads to poor word alignment, which brings a large number of errors to term alignment. At the same time, the special grammar of ancient Chinese will also affect term alignment. In order to solve the above two problems, this paper proposes a method of term alignment of historical books based on pivot language and position correspondence. This method introduces modern Chinese as the pivot language, makes use of the position correspondence between modern Chinese and English terms in sentences, and uses the sliding window method to generate candidate term pairs, which avoids the influence of word alignment errors on term alignment. In addition, if we first align to modern Chinese, the ancient Chinese terminology will complete the omitted characters in modern Chinese and replace the false characters, so as to avoid the influence of the special usage in ancient Chinese on the term alignment. The experimental results in Historical Records show that the accuracy of this method is slightly better than that of the method based on word alignment, which verifies the effectiveness of this method without word alignment.