Temporal Expressions in Japanese-to-English Machine Translation

This paper describes in outline a method for translating Japanese temporal expressions into English. We argue that temporal expressions form a special subset of language that is best handled as a special module in machine translation. The paper deals with problems of lexical idiosyncrasy as well as the choice of articles and prepositions within temporal expressions. In addition temporal expressions are considered as parts of larger structures, and the question of whether to translate them as noun phrases or adverbials is addressed.