Abstract
In this paper, a study of politeness in a translated parallel corpus of Hindi and English is done. It presents how politeness in a Hindi text is translated into English. A theoretical model (consisting of different situations that may arise while translating politeness from one language to another and different consequences of these situations) has been developed to compare the politeness value in the source and the translated text. The polite speech acts of Hindi which are most likely to be translated improperly into English are described. Based on this description, such rules will be developed which could be fed into the MT systems so that the problematic polite speech acts could be handled effectively and efficiently by the machine while translating.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Watts, R.J.: Politeness. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003)
Kumar, R.: An Overview of Politeness Strategies in Hindi. Presented at: 4th International Students’ Conference of Linguistics in India, SCONLI-4, Mumbai (2010)
Kumar, R., Jha, G.N.: Translating politeness across cultures: Case of Hindi and English. In: Proceedings of the Third ACM International Conference on Intercultural Collaboration (ICIC 2010), pp. 175–179 (2010)
Jha, G.N.: The TDIL program and the Indian Language Corpora Initiative (ILCI). In: Proceedings of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2010), pp. 982–985 (2010)
Jha, G.N.: Indian Language Corpora Initiative (ILCI). Invited talk 4th International Language and Technology Conference (4th LTC), Poznan, Poland (November 6, 2009)
Searle, J.R.: Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1979)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kumar, R. (2011). Making Machine Translations Polite: The Problematic Speech Acts. In: Singh, C., Singh Lehal, G., Sengupta, J., Sharma, D.V., Goyal, V. (eds) Information Systems for Indian Languages. ICISIL 2011. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 139. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19403-0_29
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19403-0_29
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-19402-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-19403-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)