«An analysis of the Concession relation based on the discourse marker “aunque” in a Spanish-Chinese parallel corpus»

Shuyuan Cao e Iria da Cunha
«An analysis of the Concession relation based on the discourse marker aunque in a Spanish-Chinese parallel corpus»
Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (PLN), n.º 56, 2016

Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (PLN) | Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural | Universidad de Jaén | Departamento de Informática


Extracto de páginas 86-87 del artículo en PDF

«In this work, we have explored the sentences that contain the Spanish discourse marker “aunque” and their Chinese parallel sentences inthe UN subcorpus. In the Spanish subcorpus, “aunque” shows the Concession relation.

»However, in the Chinese subcorpus, this marker has many different Chinese discourse markers, and these Chinese discourse markers hold different RST relations. Besides, in some parallel sentences, there is no translation of “aunque”.

»The original language of the officialdocuments in the UN corpus is English.

»The parallel corpus is translated from English, so the Spanish-Chinese parallel corpus is actually made up of two parts. One is the translation between English and Spanish, and the other is the translation between English and Chinese.

»These translated Spanish and Chinese documents make up the UN Spanish-Chinese parallel corpus. The UN parallel Spanish-Chinese corpus is not a direct translation corpus.

»Therefore, due to the linguistic realization (normally known as translation strategy) a Spanish discourse marker could be translated to different discourse markers in its parallel Chinese corpus.

»Also for a same sentence, nuclearity order and the number of discourse markers between these two languages could be different. In the 86 analysed sentences, the rhetorical structure between Spanish and Chinese is quite similar.

»Thismeans that the rhetorical structure has beenchanged when doing the translation work. We think this explains why the Spanish discourse marker “aunque” has been translated to different Chinese discourse markers and why it has not been translated in only a few instances. In this work we have only analysed the structure of independent sentences, only intra-sentence discourse elements have been analysed, and the analysis does not bring us many discourse differences between Spanis hand Chinese.

»However, we expect to find more discourse differences when analysing a whole text.

»This research is a corpus-based preliminary study. For our future work, we will use a larger Spanish-Chinese parallel corpus and compare their nucleus-satellite order to find morediscourse similarities and differences in order to provide discourse information for the translation between this language pair.»