Bilingual alignment and tense

In this paper, I describe one annotation of tense transfer in parallel English and Portuguese texts. Even though the primary aim of the study is to compare the tense and aspect systems of the two languages, it also raises some questions as far as bilingual alignment in general is concerned. First, I present a detailed list of clausal mismatches, which shows that intra-sentential alignment is not an easy task. Subsequently, I present a detailed quantitative description of the translation pairs found and discuss some possible conclusions for the translation of tense. Finally, I discuss some theoretical problems related to translation.