Finding Translation Equivalents: An Application Of Grammatical Metaphor

In this paper I describe how a significant class of cases that would involve (possibly complex) structural transfer in nmchine translation can be handled avoiding transfer. This is achieved by applying a semantic organization developed for monolingual text generation that is sufficiently abstract to remain invariant, within theoretically specifiable limits, across different languages. The further application of a mechanism motivated from within mono-lingual text generation, 'grammatical metaphor', then allows candidate appropriate translations to be isolated. The incorporation of these essentially monolingual mechanisms within the machine translation process promises to significantly improve translational capabilities; examples of this are presented for English and German.