Grammatical Metaphor, Controlled Languageand Machine Translation

It is a general assumption that 1) the readability and clarity of LSP texts written in a controlled language are better than uncontrolled texts and 2) that controlled languages produce better results with machine translation than uncontrolled languages. Controlled languages impose lexical, syntactic and pragmatic restrictions on the writing style of the author. We will focus on syntactic restrictions and investigate whether a writing style in which various forms of grammatical metaphors have been dissolved in order to make the text more accessible to human readers, will in fact make the texts more suitable for MT. The basis of our investigation is a small corpus of English LSP texts that have been evaluated regarding their accessibility and acceptability by human users. The MT-system we will introduce as an additional "user" of the texts is the English-Danish prototype of the Comprendium MT-system.