Automatic generation of translation dictionaries using intermediary languages

Abstract

We describe a method which uses one or more intermediary languages in order to automatically generate translation dictionaries. Such a method could potentially be used to efficiently create translation dictionaries for language groups which have as yet had little interaction. For any given word in the source language, our method involves first translating into the intermediary language(s), then into the target language, back into the intermediary language(s) and finally back into the source language. The relationship between a word and the number of possible translations in another language is most often 1-to-many, and so at each stage, the number of possible translations grows exponentially. If we arrive back at the same starting point i.e. the same word in the source language, then we hypothesise that the meanings of the words in the chain have not diverged significantly. Hence we backtrack through the link structure to the target language word and accept this as a suitable translation. We have tested our method by using English as an intermediary language to automatically generate a Spanish-to-German dictionary, and the results are encouraging.