Translating IdiomsusingParaphrasing, Machine Translation and Rescoring

Abstract

Idioms are rich multi-word expressions that can be found in many works of literature. The meaning of most idioms cannot be deduced literally. This makes translating idioms challenging. Moreover, the parallel text that contains idioms is limited. As a result, machine translation has difficulty in translating idioms correctly. Paraphrasing is a process to restate the meaning of a text or a passage using different words in the same language. Often, paraphrasing is used to give readers a clearer understanding of the original text. Paraphrasing can be used to assist machine translation in translating idioms. In this article, we attempted to improve the translation of idioms using paraphrasing. An approach that combine paraphrasing and rescoring with machine translation is proposed. The paraphrasing and rescoring improve the translation produced by neural machine translation from 12.03% to 12.92%.