Abstract
In this paper we propose a method for mechanical translation of tense and aspect expressions from Japanese into Chinese. We deal with the expressions of ‘/ta’, ‘/ru’, ‘/teiru’ and‘/teita’ that play an important role in Japanesetense and aspect expressions. Based on syntactic characteristics and co-occurring information of both Japanese and Chinese, and temporal feature of Chinese predicates, the method shows how to translate these Japanese expressions into Chinese aspectual particles such as‘/le’, ‘/zhe’, ‘/zai’, ‘/guo’, and unmarked null. We make past researches into shape, which discuss usages of tense and aspect of both languages. Our method determines matching relationship to lay down the matching ambiguities between the expressions. We evaluate our algorithm by hand and get more than 80% of accuracy. The evaluation shows the method is effbctive and acceptable within machine translation.
