Hideki Hirakawa

The treatment of complex English nominalizations in machine translation

This paper concerns the treatment, in the context of machine translation, of English complex nominal groups which can be considered as nominalizations of verb phrases. We discuss the fact that many styles of English prose which are suitable for translation by machine typically favor the use of nominal rather than verbal syntagms. But such constructions when translated literally are often considered unnatural. The general problem is described in detail, with examples. The more specific problem of recognizing nominalizations and analyzing their structure is considered. How and where to achieve the required syntactic ‘transformation’ is discussed, and exemplified.