Kashmiri to English Machine Translation: A Study in Translation Divergence Issues of Personal and Possessive Pronouns

Abstract

Machine translation (MT) as a sub-field of computational linguistics represents one of the most advanced and applied translation dimensions as a research field. Translation divergence occurs when structurally similar sentences of the source language do not translate into sentences that are similar in structure in the target language" (Dorr, 1993). The sophistication in the domain of MT depends mainly on the identification of divergence patterns in a language pair. Many researchers in MT field including Dorr (1990, 1994) have emphasized that the best quality in MT can be achieved when an individual language pair in a particular context is described in detail. This paper attempts to explore the divergence patterns that characterize the translation of Kashmiri pronouns into English. The analysis in this paper has been restricted to the class of personal and possessive pronouns. Kashmiri has rich inflections and pronouns are marked for case, number, tense and gender and show complex agreement patterns. The paper identifies and outlines a wide variety of divergence patterns that characterize the Kashmiri English language pair. These divergence patterns are identified and summarized in order to improve the quality of the MT system that may be developed for Kashmiri English language pair in the near future and can also be utilized for other language pairs that are similar in terms of their structure and typological features.