How does discourse affect S panish- C hinese Translation? A case study based on a S panish- C hinese parallel corpus (2020)

Abstract: With their huge speaking populations in the world, Spanish and Chinese occupy important positions in linguistic studies. Since the two languages come from different language systems, the translation between Spanish and Chinese is complicated. A comparative study for the language pair can discover the discourse differences between Spanish and Chinese, and can benefit the Spanish-Chinese translation. In this work, based on a Spanish-Chinese parallel corpus annotated with discourse information, we compare the annotation results between the language pair and analyze how discourse affects Spanish-Chinese translation. The research results in our study can help human translators who work with the language pair.

## introduction from the early history, people began to apply natural language processing (nlp) techniques to language researches @xcite . different nlp studies make a great advance in different language aspects, such as pragmatics, semantics, speech, etc. among different nlp studies, the emphasis on the idea that discourse information may be useful for natural language processing (nlp) has become increasingly popular. discourse analysis is an unsolved problem in this field, although discourse information is crucial for many nlp tasks @xcite . plus, the greater the linguistic distance is between a pair of languages, the greater the number of differences in their syntax and discourse structure. therefore, the translation between two very different languages can be potentially more difficult. comparative or contrastive studies of discourse structures offer clues to identify properly equivalent discourse elements in two languages. these clues can be useful for human translation. the following examples show some of the discourse differences between spanish and chinese. example 1 foot_0 : (1.1) spanish: [aunque aún no contamos con resultados,]unit 1 [intuimos que el modelo será más amplio que el del sintagma nominal.]unit 2 [dm foot_1 still not get results,]unit 1 [we consider that the model will be more extensive than the sentence group nominal.]unit 2 (1.2) spanish: [intuimos que el modelo será más amplio que el del sintagma nominal,]unit 1 [aunque aún no contamos con resultados.]unit 2 [we consider that the model will be more extensive than the sentence group nominal.]unit 1 [dm still not get results.]unit 2 (1.3) chinese: [尽 管 还 没 有 取 得 最 终 结 果， ]unit 1 [但是我们认为该模型已囊括了语段模 型涉及的内容。]unit 2 [dm1 still no get results,]unit 1 [dm2 we consider that the model contains the sentence group nominal.]unit 2 (1.4) english: although we haven't got the results yet, we consider that the model will be more extensive than the nominal sentence group. in example 1, we can see that the spanish passage (1.1) and the chinese passage (1.3) have a similar discourse structure. both passages start with a discourse marker in the first unit. however, the dms are used differently to show the same meaning in both languages. in chinese, it is mandatory to include two dms: the first one is jinguan (尽管), and it is located at the beginning of the first unit, and the other marker is danshi (但是), which is placed at the beginning of the second unit. these two discourse markers (dms) are equivalent to the english dm 'although'. by contrast, in spanish, just one dm aunque is needed to express the same meaning. besides, as we can see in another spanish passage (1.2), the order of the discourse units in can be changed and it makes sense syntactically, so the dm can appear both at the beginning of the first or the second unit. by contrast, the order cannot be changed in the chinese passage, because neither syntactically nor grammatically makes sense. due to the certain considerable discourse differences between the two languages, it is essential to carry out a discourse comparative study for spanish and chinese. therefore, based on a spanish-chinese parallel corpus, this work aims to give a discourse analysis with the intention to analyze how spanish-chinese translation can be affected from discourse level. this analysis can be beneficial for human translators who work with the language pair. in the second section, we present the theoretical framework of this study. in the third section, we talk about some related works. in the fourth section, we give detailed information on the methodology of this work. in the fifth section, we evaluate the research results and give a qualitative analysis. in the last section, we conclude our work and look ahead at future work. ## theoretical framework the rhetorical structure theory (rst) @xcite is a theory that was created especially for discourse analysis. it focuses on the hierarchical structure of a whole text, where discourse relations can be annotated within a sentence (intra-sentence style) and between sentences (intersentence style). intra-sentence and inter-sentence annotation styles help to inform how discourse elements are being expressed in a language, and translation strategies (if any) can be detected in different levels of an rs-tree (da cunha @xcite . rst addresses both hierarchical and relational aspects of text structures for discourse analysis. elementary discourse units (edus) @xcite and coherence relations are established in rst. relations are recursive in rst and are held between edus, which can be nuclei or satellites, denoted by n and s. satellites offer additional information about nuclei. edus can be linked among them holding a nucleus-satellite (e.g. cause, justify, evidence) function or a multinuclear (e.g. conjunction, list, sequence) function. as relations are recursive, all the discourse units of the text have a function in a treelike structure, if and only if the text is coherent. ## state of the art some previous researches using rst for comparative discourse are, for instance, chinese and english @xcite , japanese and spanish @xcite , arabic and english (mohamed and omer, 1999), french and english @xcite , dutch and english @xcite , spanish and basque @xcite . rst contrastive studies that use more than two languages are not common; those that have included work on portuguese-french-english @xcite and basque-english-spanish @xcite . currently, only three works use rst for spanish-chinese discourse analysis. one work is from @xcite . they explore sentences that contain the spanish discourse marker aunque ('although' in english) and their chinese parallel sentences in the un subcorpus. another work is the creation of the language teaching and learning resources for spanish-chinese by @xcite . in their work, they create a system that gives tests to check the spanish-chinese students language level through erased dms in texts. but, they only analyze the single sentences in the corpus, not the whole discourse structure of each text in the corpus. the last work talks about the spanish-chinese discourse analysis taking rst as framework is the the rst spanish-chinese treebank @xcite . @xcite establish the first spanish-chinese discourse treebank with annotated discourse information under rst. although the treebank can be useful for different nlp tasks, @xcite only create the treebank without any practical use. to our knowledge, our work is the first one that analyzes the discourse structures of a whole text for both spanish and chinese and apply the analysis results to a language translation task. ## methodology in this section, we present the methodology of this study. in the first subsection, we introduce the research corpus. in the second subsection, we explain how we carry out our analysis. ## evaluation and analysis in this section we analyze the results based on the discourse differences. based on the annotation of each text in the corpus, we compare all the parallel passages and find the following differences discourse differences in the corpus: figure 1 concludes the statistical information of the translation strategies in our study. we can see that, among the 26 cases that we collected from the annotated corpus, marker change is the most frequent translation strategy. ## conclusion in this paper, based on the annotations from the rst spanish-chinese treebank, we compare all the annotated parts to find the discourse differences between spanish and chinese. the comparison results in this study match the conclusions in @xcite . furthermore, we find some new translation strategies under rst: unit shift plus marker change, different order of edus, and added discourse. the research results can help the spanish-chinese human translation. regarding future work, we will apply our results to the shallow discourse parsing for spanish and chinese, with the intention to improve the spanish-chinese machine translation (mt) from discourse level.