Vietnamese to Chinese Machine Translation via Chinese Character as Pivot

Using Chinese characters as an intermedi-ate equivalent unit, we decompose machine translation into two stages, semantic transla-tion and grammar translation. This strategy is tentatively applied to machine translation between Vietnamese and Chinese. During the semantic translation, Vietnamese sylla-bles are one-by-one converted into the cor-responding Chinese characters. During the grammar translation, the sequences of Chi-nese characters in Vietnamese grammar or-der are modified and rearranged to form grammatical Chinese sentence. Compared to the existing single alignment model, the division of two-stage processing is more tar-geted for research and evaluation of machine translation. The proposed method is evalu-ated using the standard BLEU score and a new manual evaluation metric, understand-ing rate. Only based on a small number of dictionaries, the proposed method gives competitive and even better results com-pared to existing systems.