Collocations, Dictionaries and MT

Collocations pose specific problems in translation (both human and machine translation). For the native speaker of English it may be obvious that you ’pay attention’, but for a native speaker of Dutch it would have been much simpler if in English people ’donated attention.’ Within an MT system, we can deal with these mismatches in different ways. Simply adding the entry to our bilingual dictionary saying ’pay’ is the translation of ’schenken’, leaves us with the job of specifying in which contexts we can use this equivalence. A more elaborate dictionary might list the complete collocation alongside with its translation. Another possibility would be to adopt an interlingua and have (harmonious) monolingual components take care of mapping ’pay’ and ’schenken’ to the same meaning representation. The idea of investigating the latter possibility suggested itself while looking at the analysis of collocations in terms of lexical functions by Mel’5uk and his followers (as presented for instance in their Explanatory Combinatory Dictionaries [Mel’~uk et al., 1984]). The claim that these lexical functions are universal and only few in number, would make them interesting for the interlingua option. The ET-10 project ’Collocations or the lexicalisation of semantic operations ’1 is concerned with investigating these claims and their consequences for the automatic translation of collocations.