Syntactic Construct : An Aid for translating English Nominal Compound into Hindi

This paper illustrates a way of using paraphrasal interpretation of English nominal compound for translating them into Hindi. Input Nominal compound is first paraphrased automatically with the 8 prepositions as proposed by Lauer (1995) for the task. English prepositions have one-to-one mapping to post-position in Hindi. The English paraphrases are then translated into Hindi using the mapping schema. We have got an accuracy of 71% over a set of gold data of 250 Nominal Compound. The translation-strategy is motivated by the following observation: It is only 50% of the cases that English nominal compound is translated into nominal compound in Hindi. In other cases, they are translated into varied syntactic constructs. Among them the most frequent construction type is “Modifier + Postposition + Head”. The translation module also attempts to determine when a compound is translated using paraphrase and when it is translated into a Nominal compound.