Abstract
Based on an empirical investigation on data collected from four popular machine translation systems, this paper explores the current problems machine translation is confronted with in translating Chinese resultative constructions into English. The paper analyzes their syntactic and semantic differences in construction and in verbal pattern. The paper then further elaborates on the problems and reveals a truth that Chinese resultative construction poses a great challenge to machine translation for being very productive and flexible. Its productivity is credited to the fact that the main verbs in Chinese are mostly implied-fulfillment verbs. Its flexibility could be attributed to the hypothesis that there are fewer constraints on the co-occurrence of the main verb and the resultative in Chinese resultative construction. Finally, possible solutions are proposed in an attempt to solve the problems.
Highlights
The term ‘resultative’ was first coined by Halliday (1967: 62–66) to distinguish two types of attributes, namely the resultative and the depictive
In Mandarin Chinese resultative constructions consist of a main verb and an adjective or a verb indicating a result (Lv, 1980: 11), which are known in the literature as V-V compounds
This paper explores and analyses the problems machine translation encounters in translating Chinese resultative constructions into English
Summary
The term ‘resultative’ was first coined by Halliday (1967: 62–66) to distinguish two types of attributes, namely the resultative and the depictive. Li, 1986: 198), which are pervasive in Chinese In essence, their syntactic functions are not substantially different from those of a single verb, yet their semantics is much more complicated than the latter. Chinese resultative constructions have simple syntactic structures but complicated semantic relations, which poses a great challenge to machine translation. With the introduction of corpora, rule-based machine translation has been developed into statistical machine translation. Chinese resultative constructions are too difficult for machine translation to handle owing to their unique syntactic and semantic characteristics. The rest of the article is organized as follows: Section 2 of this article will examine the problems machine translation is confronted with in translating Chinese resultative constructions into English based on a certain amount of data.
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