Chinese Historical Term Translation Pairs Extraction Using Modern Chinese as a Pivot Language

Abstract

Term translation of Chinese historical classics is very difficult and time-consuming work, and using term alignment methods to extract term translation pairs is of great help for historical term translation. However, the limited bilingual corpora resources of historical classics and special morphology of the ancient Chinese result in poor performance of term alignment. To this end, this paper proposes a historical term alignment method using modern Chinese as a pivot language. The method first identifies English terms by rules, then aligns them from English to modern Chinese and then from modern Chinese to ancient Chinese. The use of English-modern Chinese corpus and modern-ancient Chinese corpus instead of English-ancient Chinese corpus solves the shortage problem of the parallel corpus. Moreover, using modern Chinese as a pivot language effectively reduces the alignment errors caused by the abbreviations and the interchangeable characters of ancient Chinese. In the term alignment experiment on Shiji, our method outperformed the direct alignment method significantly, which proves the validity of our method.