Spatial Lexicalization in the Translation of Prepositional Phrases

A pattern in the translation of locative prepositional phrases between English and Spanish is presented. A way of exploiting this pattern is proposed in the context of a multilingual machine translation system under development. I n t r o d u c t i o n Two of the main problems in machine translation (MT) are ambiguity and lexical gaps. Ambiguity occurs when a word in the source language (SL) has more that one translation into the target language (TL). Lexical gaps occur when a word in one language can not be translated directly into another language. This latter problem is viewed by some as the key translation problem, (Kameyama et al., 1991). A case in point is the translation of prepositional phrases (PP). The following entry for the translations into Spanish of the preposition along demonstrates this (entry taken from (Garcia-Pelayo, 1988)). along: pot (by), a lo largo de (to the length of), segfin (according to) Both problems occur here: there are three different translations for the same English preposition, and the second of these is a phrase used to describe a sense of along which is not encoded as one word in Spanish. L e x i c a l i z a t i o n P a t t e r n s It is argued in (Talmy, 1985) that languages differ in the type of information they systematically encode in lexical units. That is, languages exhibit distinct lexicalization patterns. For instance, in a sentence where both the direction and manner of motion are expressed, English will encode motion and manner in the same verb, whereas in Spanish a distinct lexicalization of these two meaning components will be favoured (Ibid. p. 69): Spa. E1 globo subi6 pot la chimenea flotando Lit. the balloon moved-up through the chimney floating Eng. The balloon floated up the chimney *This work was funded by the UK Science and Engineering Research Council Here Spanish subi6 encodes 'move + up' whereas English floated encodes 'move ÷ floating'. Capturing lexicalization patterns of this sort can help us make certain generalizations about lexical gaps and ambiguities in MT. In the rest of this paper two lexicalization patterns for English locative prepositional phrases (PP) will be presented. It will be shown how they allow us to simplify the bilingual lexicon of a transfer based, multi-lingual MT system under development.