Register-sensitive Translation: A Case Study of Mandarin and Cantonese

This paper describes an approach for translation between Chinese dialects that can produce target sentences at different registers. We focus on Mandarin as the source language, and Cantonese as the target. Mutually unintelligible, these two varieties of Chinese exhibit differences at both the lexical and syntactic levels, and the extent of the difference can vary considerably depending on the register of Cantonese. Since only a modest amount of parallel data is available, we adopt a knowledge-based approach and exploit lexical mappings and syntactic transformations from linguistics research. Our system parses a source sentence, uses register-annotated lexical mappings to translate words, and then performs word reordering through syntactic transformations. Evaluation shows that translation models that match the required register of the target sentences yield better translation quality.