Translation of the Light Verb Constructions in Japanese-Chinese Machine Translation

We study the light verb constructions in Japanese, the constructions of expressions with light verb “suru“. Such factors as numerous semantic variants and the syntactic complexity of corresponding Chinese expressions of LVCs put great difficulties in the Japanese-Chinese translation, so current commercially available Japanese-Chinese translation softwares give bad results for LVCs translation. We systematically analyze and describe the phenomena and propose translation rules for the conversion of Japanese LVCs into Chinese. we conducted manual experiments using 200 sentences to evaluate these rules and achieved a translation accuracy of over 80%. We also introduce jaw, a pattern-based translation engine, which can be applied to any target language. We implemented our translation rules for LVCs in the Chinese version, jaw/Chinese and verified their applicability in real MT system by experiments using 100 sentences. Evaluations both by hand and by the machine indicate that it provides high performance and utility.