Abstract
This paper concentrates on research into the translation of compounds in a transfer based MT system. We determine how contemporary linguistic theory can contribute to the characterisation, representation and translation of compounds. We determine productive, compositional and translatable compounds. We discuss evolving strategies for effecting translation of these compound types. The results obtained are readily adaptable to models which have a stratificational linguistic framework are able to emulate feature value percolation. The research undertaken was reductionist in nature, leading to a set of compositionally translatable productive compound types being isolated.
