Japanese-chinese machine translation for the Japanese case particle "de"

Japanese case particles are short words placed after nouns to denote the semantic roles of the preceding nouns. The Japanese case particle "de" (C) denotes particularly many roles, such as place, instrument and reason. The correspondence relationship between "de" and its Chinese translations is therefore complicated. This fact often causes mistranslation in Japanese-Chinese machine translation (MT). According to our small-scale experiments, the translation accuracy on "de" of two major online translation services are about 20% and 50%. In this paper we propose a method for translating the Japanese case particle "de" into Chinese, which determines the Chinese translation of "de" mainly by the semantic category of the noun preceding the particle. We implemented the method as pattern transfer rules on jaw/Chinese, a pilot Japanese-Chinese MT system. We evaluated the Chinese translations of "de" obtained by the method with 200 sentences from two sets of Japanese-Chinese parallel sentences, and got accuracy of 90% and 97%, respectively.