Using Dependency-Based Contextualization for transferring Passive Constructions from English to Spanish

Abstract

We hypothesize that parallel corpora as well as machine translation outputs contain many literal translations that are the result of transferring the constructions of the source language to the target language. When translating passive expressions from English to Spanish, there are several constructions available, however, both automatic and human (if of low quality) translations tend to select the periphrastic structure, which is the literal construction. The objective of this article is to make use of strategies trained on monolingual corpora to translate English passive expressions into Spanish so as to verify whether unsupervised translation with monolingual corpora benefits syntactic diversity. Special attention will be given to the monolingual-based strategy relying on dependency-based contextualization. The results of the experiments carried out show that the methods relying on monolingual corpora tend to offer more non-literal translations (middle-voice) than those trained on parallel corpora.