Project Proposal: How Verb-Particle Constructions Affect Translation Quality in English and German

This project deals with verb-particle constructions (VPCs) in the context of statistical machine translation, with the purpose of finding out if and to what degree they affect translation quality in English and German. Its main goal is to identify which types of VPCs cause translation errors and to find possible solutions to this problem. VPCs are a type of multiword expressions (MWEs), meaning they are lexical items consisting of multiple simplex words that display different kinds of idiosyncrasies [4]. Even though German and English share many common features and both languages exhibit a variety of particle verbs, their behaviour is not always similar. First of all, there are grammatical differences. For example, in English the particle is always separate from the verb root (e.g. eat up), while in German, it can be separated, but does not necessarily have to be (e.g. aufessen: er isst den Kuchen auf ). Secondly, both languages have different VPCs in general. Even though there are cases where VPCs are formed in the same manner (e.g. eat up and aufessen), there are also cases where they are formed with different particles (e.g. step down and zurücktreten), or different verbs (e.g. turn down and ablehnen). While some VPCs translate to other VPCs, there are also particle verbs that translate to simplex verbs or to several alternatives that convey the same meaning, as the following example shows (taken from Bing Translator). Mach die Tür auf! → Open the door! (1)