Resolving Translation Mismatches with Information Flow

Megumi Kameyama, Ryo Ochitani, Stanley Peters

Abstract: Languages differ in the concepts and real-world entities for which they have words and grammatical constructs. Therefore translation must sometimes be a matter of approximating the meaning of a source language text rather than finding an exact counterpart in the target language. We propose a translation framework based on Situation Theory. The basic ingredients are an information lattice, a representation scheme for utterances embedded in contexts, and a mismatch resolution scheme defined in terms of information flow. We motivate our approach with examples of translation between English and Japanese.