Abstract
Sentences obtained by translation show varied and important syntactic discrepancies. This
is true especially when the sentences are in distant languages such as Japanese and French. This
work described here explores the issue of translation divergence of these particular languages in
order to apply the results of this investigation to our transfer system.
With this intention we are interested in the discrepancy observed at the level of verbal
argument structures. We put special focus on changes of lexical category, changes of voice,
diversification of the actancial distribution and various forms of actualized predicate.
These disparities often are correlated with each other and have common origins. For
example they can be explained by what Pottier calls ‘event statutes’ of the predicate. That is,
according to whether the event to be expressed is one of state or evolution, the way of
representing the event is different. Furthermore, this differentiation largely depends on the
lexicon of each language and also on the syntactico-semantic constraints which each language
imposes on its lexicon.
We have thus endeavored to extract factors which, on the one hand, are correlated
between the diverging facts and, on the other hand, are common to our two languages. We have
included these factors in the lexical description, in considering that they thus enable the transfer
system to apply operations which neutralize the disparity.
Having formalized these lexical descriptions which are based on unification grammar, we
show how the transfer system uses the common factors in order to neutralize the discrepancy.
KEY WORDS :
translation divergence, Japanese, French, verbal argument structure, diverging facts correlation,
unification grammar, linguistically motivated transfer system