VIRTEX - a German-Russian Translation Experiment

Machine Translation from German into Russian did not gain the attention it deserves so far. Especially such typical Russian phenomena like the aspect of verbs complicate the translation process. The known MT approaches do not deal with such problems in a satisfactory way. To overcome this lack, we started the German.Russian translation experiment VIRTEX. We focussed our attention on the crucial point -a high quality translation of verbal groups (VIRTEX = Verbs-intoRussian Translation Experiment). That means, VIRTEX is made to solve on principle the linguistic difficulties connected with verb translation: recognition of German analytical tense forms, passive constructions, reflexive forms and verbs with detached prefixes analysis of complex German verb groups (modal and modal-like constructions) selection of Russian equivalents according to valency frames including seman ~ tic features of verb complements choice of the appropriate Russian aspect form passive-active transformation in case of missing Russian passive form adequate translation of modal constructions. The used vocabulary, above 200 sample verbs, is selected to represent these phenomena completely. To translate verbal groups adequately, £t is necessary to have some context. Tberefore we accept as input simple sentence 9 with verb complements and adverbials. That means we have also a set of nouns, pronouns, adverbs and some other words, The restricted syntax model is made for short main clauses; it excludes rela-tire and other subordinated clauses, attributes and infinitive clauses with complements. VIRTEX can be classified as an NT system between second and third generation with a syntactic interface structure completed by some semantic information. The system's architecture is the classical one. Analysis, Transfer and Synthesis are sequentially processed separate routines. For each of them an extra lexicon has been implemented. The inputwork is supported by special tools including an automatic generation of the inflectional types. While the procedures are written in LISP, the dictionaries and their editors are made in dBASE. The format restrictions of dBASE are compensated by a special management of the entries and a corresponding way of LISP access to them. VIRTEX runs on PC-XT. Some steps of the system will shortly be illustrated.