The Comparative Approach To The Translation Of English Typical Patterns In Mt Software

Machine Translation (MT), automatic translation of human languages by computers, has brought about great popularity as well as controversy throughout the world. This thesis starts with a brief review of MT development, its birth and growth in China and worldwide. After great efforts devoted in the past decades, considerable success has been achieved in MT research, which could be strongly proved by the prosperity of MT software, specifically software for article translation, such as Transtar, Yacin CAT 2.5, IBM Manager 2000, Dongfangkuaiche XP, Jinshankuaiyi 2003 and Dr.eye (Yidiantong 2003).However, there is still a long way to go in MT for the reason that some crucial problems remain unsolved, such as ambiguity, pronoun reference, restoration of ellipsis and adjustment of word orders in translating typical patterns. Some typical factors contribute to these difficulties. For instance, words with multiple meanings or sentences with multiple grammatical structures may lead to ambiguity; the pronoun reference depends heavily on the context recognition and determination, on the coordination of related words or the acting range of conjunction.As a result, the paper, from the perspective of comparative study between English and Chinese, just proceeds to focus on the adjustment of word orders in translating some typical patterns from English into Chinese. Based on three fundamental theories available for MT: translation equivalence, Generative-Transformational grammar and syntactic relations, diagnostic tests are carried out to examine the efficiency of the MT software, in terms of the adjustment of word orders.A conclusion can be drawn that, by means of contrastive study, there is a big distinction in some typical patterns between English and Chinese: There be pattern, It pattern, passive voice and the like. Translation skills or techniques in particular are required to adjust versions to the unique characteristics of the patterns in both languages. This makes it difficult for MT software to render such patterns from English into Chinese: one is the dealing with such empty anticipatory as There in There be pattern and It in It pattern, and the structure "be + verb-ed" in passive voice; the other is the adjustments of word orders adapting to Chinese styles.Some hypotheses are presented in the paper to cope with both the disadvantages in MT software on the basis of the diagnostic tests and analyses in detail. In the end, a tentative program for There belli pattern is designed based on those hypotheses, which can be practically attested by the samples that originally the MT software has problems in translating. The success of the tentative program is bound to benefit some MT researchers from the perspective of linguistics, specifically those who are involved in the study of MT software.