Issues in Translating Verb-Particle Constructions from German to English

摘要

In this paper, we investigate difficulties in translating verb-particle constructions from German to English. We analyse the structure of German VPCs and compare them to VPCs in English. In order to find out if and to what degree the presence of VPCs causes problems for statistical machine translation systems, we collected a set of 59 verb pairs, each consisting of a German VPC and a synonymous simplex verb. With this data, we constructed a test suite of 236 sentences where the simplex verb and VPC are completely substi-tutable. We then translated this dataset to English using Google Translate and Bing Translator. Through an analysis of the resulting translations we are able to show that the quality decreases when translating sentences that contain VPCs instead of simplex verbs. The test suite is made freely available to the community.