tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Semantic Transliteration of Personal Names"

Words of foreign origin are referred to as borrowed words or loanwords. A loanword is usually imported to Chinese by phonetic transliteration if a translation is not easily available. Semantic transliteration is seen as a good tradition in introducing foreign words to Chinese. Not only does it preserve how a word sounds in the source language, it also carries forward the word’s original semantic attributes. This paper attempts to automate the semantic transliteration process for the first time. . | Semantic Transliteration of Personal Names Haizhou Li Khe Chai Sim Jin-Shea Kuof Minghui Dong Institute for Infocomm Research f Chung-Hwa Telecom Laboratories Singapore 119613 Taiwan hli kcsim mhdong @ jskuo@ Abstract Words of foreign origin are referred to as borrowed words or loanwords. A loanword is usually imported to Chinese by phonetic transliteration if a translation is not easily available. Semantic transliteration is seen as a good tradition in introducing foreign words to Chinese. Not only does it preserve how a word sounds in the source language it also carries forward the word s original semantic attributes. This paper attempts to automate the semantic transliteration process for the first time. We conduct an inquiry into the feasibility of semantic transliteration and propose a probabilistic model for transliterating personal names in Latin script into Chinese. The results show that semantic transliteration substantially and consistently improves accuracy over phonetic transliteration in all the experiments. 1 Introduction The study of Chinese transliteration dates back to the seventh century when Buddhist scriptures were translated into Chinese. The earliest bit of Chinese translation theory related to transliteration may be the principle of Names should follow their bearers while things should follow Chinese. In other words names should be transliterated while things should be translated according to their meanings. The same theory still holds today. Transliteration has been practiced in several ways including phonetic transliteration and phonetic-semantic transliteration. By phonetic 120 transliteration we mean rewriting a foreign word in native grapheme such that its original pronunciation is preserved. For example London becomes A Lun-Dun 1 which does not carry any clear connotations. Phonetic transliteration represents the common practice in transliteration. Phonetic-semantic transliteration hereafter referred to as .