Lexical transfer: a tough problem to structure-bound

One of the necessary tasks of a machine translation system is lexical transfer. In some cases there is a one-to-one mapping from source language word to target language word. What theoretical model is followed when there is a one-to-many mapping? Unfortunately, none of the linguistic models that have been used in machine translation include a lexical transfer component. In the absence of a theoretical model, this paper will suggest a new way to test lexical transfer systems. This test is being applied to an MT system under development. One possible conclusion may be that further effort should be expended developing models of lexical transfer.