A model of comparative stylistics for machine translation
Machine Translation, (1994)10.1007/BF00980198.Abstract
The study of comparative stylistics attempts to catalogue and explain
the differences in style between languages. Rules of comparative
stylistics are commonly presented in textbooks of translation as
simple ‘rules of thumb’, but if we hope to incorporate a knowledge
of comparative stylistics into machine translation systems, we must
take a more systematic approach. We develop a formal model of comparative
syntactic stylistics to be used as a component of a general computational
theory of style. We adapt textbook rules of human translation and
study a small corpus of French-English translations to determine
how these informal rules can be represented in our model as formal
rules of translation. Our model of comparative stylistics could be
implemented in a machine translation system, enabling the system
to make a more informed decision about possible translation choices
and their potential stylistic effects.