Analysis of the chinese – portuguese machine translation of chinese localizers qian and hou

Abstract

The focus of the present article is the two Chinese localizers qian (front) and hou (back), in their function of time, in the process of the Chinese-Portuguese machine translation, and is integrated in the project Autema SynTree (annotation and Analysis of Bilingual Syntactic Trees for Chinese/Portuguese). The text corpus used in the research is composed of 46 Chinese texts, extracted from The International Chinese Newsweekly, identified as source text (ST), and target texts (TT) are composed of translations into Portuguese executed by the Portuguese-Chinese Translator (PCT) and humans. In Portuguese the prepositions of transversal axis such as antes de and depois de, are used to indicate the time before and after, corresponding to qian and hou in Chinese. Nevertheless, inconsistencies related to the translation of the localizers are found in the output of the PCT when comparing it with the human translation (HT). Based thereupon, the present article shows the developed syntax rules to solve the inconsistencies found in the PCT output. The translations and the proposed rules were evaluated through the application of BLEU metrics.