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Keeping the Meanings of the Source Text: An Introduction to Yes Translate

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Chinese Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing Based on Naturally Annotated Big Data (NLP-NABD 2016, CCL 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10035))

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Abstract

The primary task of language translation is to faithfully pass the meaning(s) of the source text to the target language. Unfortunately, meanings often get lost or distorted in machine translation, including state-of-the-art Google Translate and Baidu Translate. Yes Translate is a Chinese-English translation tool to be maximally loyal to the source text while maintaining adequate fluency. This is implementable by avoiding risky actions of word deleting, adding and re-ordering. The tool is supported by an 116,000-words Dictionary. In an experiment on natural news articles freely selected by themselves, 10 postgraduate students with good command of Chinese and English all agreed or strongly agreed that the general meaning of the translation by Yes Translate was correct and understandable. And 9 out of the 10 students agreed or strongly agreed that the general meaning of each sentence was correct.

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Acknowledgements

The project has been partially supported by a University research fund (Account Code: 4-ZZEW). The author is also very grateful to the three anonymous reviewers, whose valuable comments helped in the revision of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Xiaoheng Zhang

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  1. Xiaoheng Zhang
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Correspondence to Xiaoheng Zhang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tsinghua University , Beijing, China

    Maosong Sun

  2. Fudan University , Shanghai, China

    Xuanjing Huang

  3. Dalian University of Technology , Dalian, China

    Hongfei Lin

  4. Tsinghua University , Beijing, China

    Zhiyuan Liu

  5. Tsinghua University , Beijing, China

    Yang Liu

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Zhang, X. (2016). Keeping the Meanings of the Source Text: An Introduction to Yes Translate. In: Sun, M., Huang, X., Lin, H., Liu, Z., Liu, Y. (eds) Chinese Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing Based on Naturally Annotated Big Data. NLP-NABD CCL 2016 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10035. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47674-2_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47674-2_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47673-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47674-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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