Accounting for Style in Machine Translation

A significant part of the meaning of any text lies in the author's style. Different choices of words and syntactic structure convey different nuances in meaning, which must be carried through in any translation if it is to be considered faithful. Up to now, machine translation systems have been unable to do this. Subtleties of style are simply lost to current MT systems. The goal of the present research is to develop a method to provide MT systems with the ability to understand and preserve the intent of an author's stylistic characteristics. Unilingual natural language understanding systems could also benefit from an appreciation of these aspects of meaning. However, in translation, style plays an additional role, for here one must also deal with the generation of appropriate target-language style. Consideration of style in translation involves two complementary, but sometimes conflicting, aims: • The translation must preserve, as much as possible, the author's stylistic intent— the information conveyed through the manner of presentation. • But it must have a style that is appropriate and natural to the target language. The study of comparative stylistics is, in fact, guided by the recognition that languages differ in their stylistic approaches: each has its own characteristic stylistic preferences. The stylistic differences between French and English are exemplified by the predominance of the pronominal verb in French. This contrast allows us to recognize the greater preference of English for the passive voice: (1) (a) Le jambon se mange froid. (b) Ham is eaten cold.