<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="C86-1155">
  <Title>Future Di rec t i ons of Mach i n;. ~ Trans l at i on</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="656" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Translation between J apa~\]ese and Indo-European
Languages
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The MT research and development activities in Japan including the Mu project are distinguished from others in that they all aim to treat language pairs of quite different \]anguage families, i.e. Japanese and one of the Indo-European languages, typica\]ly English; most of the activities in other parts of the world, with few exceptions \[Tong 1986 \] \[Loh 1975\]\[Feng \]982\], have focused on translation among Indo-European \]anguages. Because Japanese is quite diEferent from Indo-European languages in various aspects such as its \]exica\] items, syntactic and semantic structures, etc., the trans\]at\]on process bas to be much more sophisticated.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The experience of PAIIO-SPANAM \[Vasconcellos 1985\] shows, for example, in the translation from Spanish to English, that translation results sufficient for native speakers of English to correct translation errors can be obtained even without having a separate phase (the analysis phase) of obtaining explicit representations of the syntactic structures of source sentences. In contrast to this, because Japanese and English have quite different phrase orderings, results of th.i.s standard cannot be obtained in Japanese-English translation unless the entire syntactic structure of the source sentences is captured. Furthermore, in Japanese-Ehglish translation, different syntactic interpretations of source sentences almost always lead to different translations so that we cannot expect syntactic ambiguities to be preserved in both languages. That is, although the METAl, group \[Beneht 1985\] reports that 'We employ only the highest-scoring reading (i.e.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> syntactic interpretat.ion) for translation ....</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Surprisingly often, a number of the higher-scoring interpretations will be translated identical', we can rarely expect this to happen in translation between Japanese and English. Moreover, certain syntactic concepts which are supposed to be common to all Indo-European languages are quite problematic in Japanese. For example, \]..We do not \]\]ave in Japanese explicit marking of defJ nite and indefinite distinctions among noun phrases by determiners 2.Whether the concept of syntactic subject exists in Japanese or not is undetermined among Japanese linguists 3.Although relative clause constructions in English and embedded clause constructions in Japanese roughly correspond to each other, the two constructions have quite different characteristics. Japanese embedded  clauses should be translated into many other syntactic constructions such as (preposition + --ing\] forms of phrases which modify nouns, appositional phrases introduced by 'that', etc., depending on the semantic relationships between the modifying clauses (embedded clauses) and the modified noun \[Nagao 1984, 1986\].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> These facts indicate that capturing the syntactic structures of entire source sentences is necessary, although not sufficient, for the translation between English and Japanese. Moreover, we need a certain amount of change in the syntactic structures of source sentences in order to generate natural translations. It is obvious that translation between all language pairs requires more or less structural change, but to what extent such structure change is necessary and to what extent such structure change requires semantic or extra-linguistic know\].edge (and so, cannot be systematically formulated upon syntactic structures alone) is highly dependent on individual language pairs. Pairs such as Japanese and one of the Indo-European languages offer one of the extremes:we often have to refer to deeper structures than syntactic ones, such as the so-called semantic or conceptual structures of sentences, in order to obtain natural translations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> That 'deeper' understanding is relevant to high quality translations is intuitively obvious.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> However, the discrepancy between Japanese and Indo-European languages is so large that even at certain deeper levels the discrepacy still remains; l. The correspondence of words in the two languages, English and Japanese, is not so straightforward. This implies that a set of semantic or conceptual units, from which deeper level representations of source sentences might be constructed, is difficult to define (see Section 4).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> 2.A single event in the real world is often captured differently in the two languages. For example, an event which is expressed in English by a sentence with a transitive verb is often expressed in Japanese by a sentence with an intransitive verb accompanied by a deep cause case element. Even deep semantic case relationships seem then to be dependent on individual languages. Although more or less the same phenomenon has been observed even in translation among Indo-European languages (for example, (King, 1986\]), the difference between Japanese and the Indo-European languages in terms of their deep case structures remains particularly large.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> These considerations have led the MT researchers in Japan to basic problems as to what kinds of 'understanding' are relevant to translation, whether results of 'understanding' sentences (texts) can be represented independently from individual languages, and finally, what 'understanding' sentences can really mean. These issues should be made clear not only for translations of language pairs belonging to quite different language families but also for developing future high quality MT systems for any language pair. The Japanese Ministry of Post and Telecommunication, for example, recently announced s new, 15 year project for the simultaneous translation of telephone communication, in which ordinary dialogues will be translated. We cannot expect in such a system the heavy interventions of professional translators that most current MT systems presume.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Raw translation results should be natural enough for  people without any knowledge of the source languages.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>