Multilingual text alignment

This chapter addresses a number of questions regarding multilingual texts, where multilingual texts is taken as meaning texts represented in more than two languages. In particular, it raises the question of whether there is any real use for mapping out multilingual translation equivalence. The view that is proposed is that multiple versions of a text can (and should) be seen as additional sources of information that can effectively be exploited to produce better bilingual alignments. A general multilingual alignment technique is presented, whose computational complexity, for a given number of texts, is the same as that of bilingual alignment. Experimental results show how this method. improves the accuracy of bilingual alignments on a trilingual corpus (The Gospel According to John, in English, French and Spanish).Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye