A study on machine translation of resultative constructions

Abstract

Based on an empirical investigation on data collected from four popular machine translation systems, this paper explores the current problems machine translation is confronted with in translating Chinese resultative constructions into English. The paper analyzes their syntactic and semantic differences in construction and in verbal pattern. The paper then further elaborates on the problems and reveals a truth that Chinese resultative construction poses a great challenge to machine translation for being very productive and flexible. Its productivity is credited to the fact that the main verbs in Chinese are mostly implied-fulfillment verbs. Its flexibility could be attributed to the hypothesis that there are fewer constraints on the co-occurrence of the main verb and the resultative in Chinese resultative construction. Finally, possible solutions are proposed in an attempt to solve the problems.