Langues et cultures, systèmes et traduction

Abstract

In this paper we compare languages having the same origin and others with different roots so as to demonstrate what they have in common and how they differ for the purpose of machine translation. In doing so, we will revisit the notions of ‘word’ and ‘part of speech’. These comparisons demonstrate how different are the views of the world through civilisations, and their impact on the structure of languages (compounds, idioms, proverbs will served our demonstration). Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Thai and Turkish will be at the basis of our studies. These comparisons aim at showing through examples how dictionaries should be organised and how to obtain acceptable translations made by machine.