Abstract
This paper discusses the challenges which Chinese-English machine translation (MT) systems face in translating personal names. We show that the translation of names between Chinese and English is complicated by different factors, including orthographic, phonetic, geographic and social ones. Four existing systems were tested for their capability in translating personal names from Chinese to English. Test data embodying geographic and sociolinguistic differences were obtained from a synchronous Chinese corpus of news media texts. It is obvious that systems vary considerably in their ability to identify personal names in the source language and render them properly in the target language. Given the criticality of personal name translation to the overall intelligibility of a translated text, the coverage of personal names should be one of the important criteria in the evaluation of MT performance. Moreover, name translation, which calls for a hybrid approach, would remain a central issue to the future development of MT systems, especially for online and real-time applications.- Anthology ID:
- 2001.mtsummit-road.9
- Volume:
- Workshop on MT2010: Towards a Road Map for MT
- Month:
- September 18-22
- Year:
- 2001
- Address:
- Santiago de Compostela, Spain
- Editor:
- Steven Krauwer
- Venue:
- MTSummit
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Note:
- Pages:
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2001.mtsummit-road.9
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Benjamin K. Tsou and Oi Yee Kwong. 2001. Evaluating Chinese-English translation systems for personal name coverage. In Workshop on MT2010: Towards a Road Map for MT, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
- Cite (Informal):
- Evaluating Chinese-English translation systems for personal name coverage (Tsou & Kwong, MTSummit 2001)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp22-frontmatter/2001.mtsummit-road.9.pdf