Pragmatic information in translation: a corpus-based study of tense and mood in English and German

Abstract: Grammatical tense and mood are important linguistic phenomena to consider in NLP research. We consider the correspondence between English and German tense and mood in translation. Human translators do not find this correspondence easy, and as we will show through careful analysis, there are no simplistic ways to map tense and mood from one language to another. Our observations about the challenges of human translation of tense and mood have important implications for multilingual NLP. Of particular importance is the challenge of modeling tense and mood in rule-based, phrase-based statistical and neural machine translation.