Handling of Prepositions in English to Bengali Machine Translation

The present study focuses on the lexical meanings of prepositions rather than on the thematic meanings because it is intended for use in an English-Bengali machine translation (MT) system, where the meaning of a lexical unit must be preserved in the target language, even though it may take a different syntactic form in the source and target languages. Bengali is the fifth language in the world in terms of the number of native speakers and is an important language in India. There is no concept of preposition in Bengali. English prepositions are translated to Bengali by attaching appropriate inflections to the head noun of the prepositional phrase (PP), i.e., the object of the preposition. The choice of the inflection depends on the spelling pattern of the translated Bengali head noun. Further postpositional words may also appear in the Bengali translation for some prepositions. The choice of the appropriate post-positional word depends on the WordNet synset information of the head noun. Idiomatic or metaphoric PPs are translated into Bengali by looking into a bilingual example base. The analysis presented here is general and applicable for translation from English to many other Indo-Aryan languages that handle prepositions using inflections and postpositions.