Translational mismatches involving clitics (illustrated from Serbian catalan language pair)

© 2015, IGI Global. All rights reserved. Translation of sentences featuring clitics often poses a problem to machine translation systems. In this chapter, we illustrate, on the material from a Serbian ~ Catalan parallel corpus, a rule-based approach to solving translational structural mismatches between linguistic representations that underlie source-and target language sentences containing clitics. Unlike most studies in this field, which make use of phrase structure formalisms, ours has been conducted within the dependency framework of the Meaning-Text linguistic theory. We start by providing a brief description of Catalan and Serbian clitic systems, then introduce the basics of our framework to finally illustrate Serbian ~ Catalan translational mismatches involving the operations of clitic doubling, clitic climbing, and clitic possessor raising.