Research Article
Challenges Faced in the Treatment of Idioms and Phrases during EnglishPunjabi Machine Translation Jitin Chhabra1, Dharamveer Sharma2
Abstract An attempt has been made to identify and investigate some existing hurdles in the process of translating idioms and phrases from one language to another. The present study shed lights on Mona Baker's categorization of problems faced during inter-lingual translation of idiomatic pairs and makes an effort to examine those problems and apply them practically largely for some English as well as their existing equivalent Punjabi idioms and phrases. The study signs and reflects that there are a number of crucial factors which should be taken care of in order to translate fixed multiword expressions or idiomatic pairs precisely and accurately.
Keywords: Idioms, Machine translation, Phrases, Translation problems Introduction The multiword fixed expressions like Idioms and phrases are non-isolating component of every language which is found in abundance in most of the languages in the world. As the semantics and meaning of these arrangement of words cannot be explained from the individual meanings of the component words constituting them, so there are some obstacles in the process of understanding as well as machine translation. The action of translating idioms and phrases from one Human language into another language is a highly intelligent task which demands a translator to have a good knowledge and understanding of both the languages and cultures being communicated in the process of aligning and finding a precise equivalent for the inter-lingual idiomatic pairs. In order to convey a similar but not exactly the same meaning, people of various languages use different fixed expressions in such a fashion that while a phrase might seem easy and simple to understand for the ones who represent it, the same combination of words may seem completely dim and unclear. This reflects that every language has got some culture -specific components that are completely different from the corresponding items existing in another language. This leads us to the need of carefully finding the idiomatic pairs in both the languages so that the efficient translation can be done. Hence, there exist two important concerns in this scenario: 1) How to understand the semantics and meanings of idioms and phrases of a specific language; and 2) How to align and recreate the same sets of idioms and phrases of source language to target language in a style that they might express exactly the same meaning as of the original language. This study targets to examine what kind of hurdles arise in the two actions of translation and interpretation of idioms and phrases from the source language to the target language. Various practical examples and illustrations of English and Punjabi idioms and phrases will be used throughout the contents of this article. 1
M.Tech, Computer Science and Engineering, Student, 2Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab, India. Correspondence: Mr. Jitin Chhabra, Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab, India.
E-mail Id: jitincena@gmail.com Orcid Id: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8115-062X How to cite this article: Chhabra J, Sharma D. Challenges Faced in the Treatment ofIdioms and Phrases d uring English- Punjabi Machine Translation. J Adv Res Appl Arti Intel Neural Netw 2017; 4(1&2): 12-15.
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J. Adv. Res. Appl. Arti. Intel. Neural Netw. 2017; 4(1&2)
The problems that arise during the task of understanding the meanings of idioms and phrases will be discovered and shown through English-Punjabi idiomatic pairs. A number of ideas and actions, regarding the translation of idioms and phrases, made by various computer science scholars as will also be taken into consideration in order to analyze the obstacles that arise during English-Punjabi Machine Translation of Multiword fixed expressions.
Natural Language Processing Natural Language Processing is a field of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics and computer science, related with the interactions that occur between computer systems and languages known by humans. Natural language processing includes the study of computational as well as mathematical modeling of various parts of a situation in a language and the development of a broad range of computational systems. Natural language processing is having a vital function in the field of computer science as many views of this area work with linguistic characterization of computation. This contains the spoken language computational systems that integrate speech and human languages. Natural language processing is the region of research and development studies which examines how computers could be used to manipulate and understand human language text/speech to perform useful things. Natural language processing applications include fields of study, such as machine translation systems, natural language text/speech processing, interfaces for user terminals, information retrieval systems for cross language platforms, text/speech recognition, artificial intelligence and expert knowledge systems.
Machine Translation Machine Translation is an area of computational linguistics that illustrates is an act of using software programs to translate text and speech from one human language to another human language. Machine Translation carries out a simple task of translating words, sentences and phrases from source language to the target language, but it is not capable of producing a precise translation and recognition of phrases or multiword expressions such that it should infer the same context and meaning in the target language. Machine Translation describes the skill of computer systems to perform the job of translation between
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different human known natural languages. The construction of multilingual Machine Translation systems for any human languages using electronic resources and tools is a quite difficult job that requires a lot of computational knowledge and skills. Machine translation can be performed with rule-based, statistical-based or hybrid methods. Machine Translation systems are specially developed for two particular languages, called a bilingual translation system, and for more than a single pair of languages, known as multilingual translation systems. A bilingual translation system can be unidirectional which converts text from one human Language to another human Language, or it can be bidirectional capable of interlingual translations. The approaches differ in the examination of the source language and degree of realization to reach a language independent representation of context between the source and target human languages. Obstacles in efficient and precise Machine Translation output can be characterized to ambiguities in the natural languages.
Idioms and Phrases The common sentence 'Idioms and Phrases' refers to commonly used unit of words in English. Idioms are used for informal situations, whereas phrases may also be rather applied in formal. Idioms and Phrases play a crucial role in learning English as well as Punjabi language. Idioms and phrases are the multiword fixed expressions which are used in an idiomatic sense, rather than a figurative meaning under specific scenarios. Idioms are often regarded full sentences whereas Phrases are made up of a few words which are used as a grammatical component in a sentence. Idioms are the fixed expressions whose meaning cannot be inferred by the meanings of the constituent words present in it but must be explained as a whole, e.g. ring a bell, It’s raining like cats and dogs, spill the beans etc. An idiom is a unit of words having a fixed order whose meaning is different from the meanings of the individual words present in it, for example ‘a cold fish’ which indicates a person who doesn’t seem so friendly and doesn’t show his/her emotions. English and Punjabi are both flooded with idioms. Idioms are the perfect example of national features in a language which prospered in customs and habits for describing a society. Cultural and regional knowledge is also embedded in idioms.
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Analogy in the Two Languages There are a lot of human languages in the world which are different from each other in many aspects. It is also easy to see that the people belonging to different countries have got different and quite diverse set of ideologies. Every society has different opinions and beliefs about the world and these different ideologies have the power to affect different languages as well as the ways of expressing and presenting meanings. Multiword Fixed expressions or idioms and phrases have got extremely large reservoir in a way that they can include many cultural aspects, religious beliefs, superstitions, and different ideologies of the people from diverse societies and nations. The clear understanding of both the ideologies and cultures is required in order to translate the words, phrases and sentences between different languages.
Hurdles in the Translation of Idioms and Phrases As the two languages are quite different in the cultural aspects, grammatical word orders, word sense ambiguities, their translation process needs to be taken care of these considerations. The challenges faced by the designer of an algorithm for automatic text alignment during the machine translation of multiword fixed expressions are as follows:
a) A fixed expression or an idiom may be having no equivalent in the target language. Example: The following idioms do not have English equivalent idioms: | Idiomatic meaning: Wealth without use is no wealth.
Idiomatic meaning: Incompetent persons cannot do a tough job.
b) A fixed expression or an idiom might be having a similar expression in the target language, which resembles the source text but its context of use may be different. Example: English: To kick the bucket. (To die) Punjabi: The above example shows how both languages have similar looking expressions but their intentions and context are different.
c) An idiom may be used in the source text in both its idiomatic and literal sense at the same time. Example: The following idioms have literal as well as figurative meaning.
Kick the bucket This idiom has figurative meaning as to die and literal meaning as to really kick the bucket.
Spill the beans This idiom has figurative meaning as to tell/leak secret information and literal meaning as to really spill them.
d) The rule of building idioms in written form, the contexts of using it, and the frequency in which it is used may be different in the source and target languages. Example: English: It’s raining like cats and dogs
Punjabi: English: A drop in the ocean Punjabi:
Idiomatic meaning: Extraordinary care is needed for unique things.
e) Recognition and interpretation problems Example: Break a leg
Idiomatic meaning: Lazy people lives in the same society.
This idiom describes the meaning as to wish good luck and hence difficult to interpret as it does not have anything linked with breaking the leg.
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f) Ambiguity Problems Example:
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process with suitable examples. The concept of having a deep knowledge on both Source and Target language has been illustrated so as to understand the superficial meanings of idioms and phrases of the source language and then to recreate the same set of exact counterparts in the target language.
English: To make someone feel afraid or frightened
References
English: Eye check-up from doctor
Conclusions In this article, we presented the various problems that arise during the translation of idioms and phrases from English to Punjabi. The crucial purpose of cultural aspects and socio-linguistics were magnified by a number of examples in showing the fact that the more two cultures and languages are identical to each other, the more easily the task of translating idiomatic expressions becomes. The various difficulties while bilingual translation of fixed expressions has been presented in accordance to English-Punjabi translation
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