Tag Archives: ambiguity

Leaving ambiguity unresolved

Disambiguation is an essential process in machine translation. Sometimes, however, it seems more rational and logical to leave an ambiguity in the translation. This is the case when (i) there is an ambiguous word in the sentence to be translated; and (ii) the context does not provide an objective reason to choose one of the two occurrences. It seems that in this case, the best translation is the one that leaves the ambiguity intact.

Let’s take an example. Consider the following French sentence: ‘Son palais était en feu.’. The French word ‘palais’ is ambiguous, because it corresponds in English and in Corsican to two different words (palace, palazzu and palate, palatu).

Thus, we have 3 possibilities of translation:

  • His palate was on fire
  • His palace was on fire
  • His palace/palate was on fire

The third translation, in my opinion, is better, because it points out that the context is insufficient to choose one of the two alternatives.

Consider now, on the one hand, the following sentence: ‘Il avait mangé du piment fort. Son palais était en feu.’ Now the context provides an objective motivation to choose one of the two occurence. This yields the following translation: He had eaten some hot pepper. His palate was on fire.

On the other hand, consider the following sentence: ‘Les ennemis du prince avaient lancé des engins incendiaires. Son palais était en feu.’ We also have here an objective reason to choose the other alternative. It translates then: The prince’s enemies had thrown incendiary devices. His palace was on fire.

Further reflexions on the status of “I love you” in Corsican language

Let us briefly recall the problem: translating ‘I love you’ might sound trivial, but it’s not. In fact, ‘ti amu‘ is not the best translation. The best translation is ‘ti tengu caru‘ when addressed to a male person, or ‘ti tengu cara‘ when addressed to a female person. Hence the proposed preliminary translation ‘ti tengu caru/cara‘. Such rough translation requires further disambiguation, but on what precise grounds?

Let us look at the issue from an analytical perspective. It appears that we need to assign a reference to the pronoun ‘te’ (you, ti). The latter could be identified according to the context, depending on whether the person ‘te’ refers to is male or female. At this stage, it appears that it is better to consider that the personal object pronoun has an inherent gender: masculine or feminine. This gender does not affect the pronoun itself which remains ‘te’ (you, ti) independently of the gender, but it does have an effect on the words that depend on it, i.e. the adjective caru/cara in Corsican, in the locution ti tengu caru/cara. The upshot is: in this case, ‘te’ (you, ti) is a personal object pronoun, masculine or feminine, whose inherent ambiguity can be solved according to the context.

The enigmatic grammatical status of “I love you” in Corsican language

Translating ‘I love you’ might sound trivial, but it’s not. In fact, ‘ti amu‘ is not the best translation. The best translation is ‘ti tengu caru‘ when addressed to a male person, or ‘ti tengu cara‘ when addressed to a female person. Hence the proposed translation ‘ti tengu caru/cara‘, whose (difficult) disambiguation must be done according to the context.

It is worth sketching a few ideas, in order to get some insight into this issue. First of all, let’s look at the problem synthetically. This underlines the problem inherent in the grammatical status of the sentence ‘je t’aime’ (I love you) in French or in English, as it is not known whether it is addressed to a male or a female person. If one were to assign a gender to this sentence, it would therefore be masculine or feminine, with an inherent ambiguity. Assigning in some way a gender – masculine or feminine – to a sentence may seem strange prima facie, but it could prove useful (to be confirmed) In this case, the gender associated with the sentence would be inherited from the pronoun ‘t’ (short for ‘te’) which remains unambiguated with the sentence ‘je t’aime’ (I love you, ti tengu caru/cara) alone.

Second, let’s look at the issue from an analytical perspective. For another way to solve the problem could be to assign a reference to the pronoun ‘te’ (you). The latter could be identified according to the context. This sounds more promising and more in line with the well-known problem of pronoun resolution.