Reversible Machine Translation: What to Do When the Languages Don’t Match Up

In this paper we deal with issues that face an interlingua-based, reversible machine translation system when the literal meaning of the source text is not identical to the literal meaning of the natural target translation. We first outline the problem and show, using examples, some common situations in which the problem arises. We then describe a theoretical framework that lets us begin to define what it means to solve the problem. Finally, we present an algorithm for lexical choice that handles many of these cases and that relies exclusively on reversible, monolingual linguistic descriptions and a language-independent domain knowledge base.

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