@TECHREPORT{R-95-18, PSURL = {/publications/cgi-bin/tr-fetch.pl?r-95-18+ps}, NUMBER = {R-95-18}, INSTITUTION = ida, ADDRESS = idaaddr, YEAR = {1995}, AUTHOR = {Stys, Malgorzata and Zemke, Stefan}, TITLE = {Incorporating Discourse Aspects in English-Polish MT:Towards Robust Implementation}, ABSTRACTURL = {/publications/cgi-bin/tr-fetch.pl?r-95-18+abstr}, ABSTRACT = {The main aim of translation is an accurate transfer of meaning so that the result is not only grammatically and lexically correct but also communicatively adequate. This paper stresses the need for discourse analysis in order to preserve the communicative meaning in English Polish machine translation. Unlike English which is a positional language with word order being grammatically determined, Polish displays a strong tendency to order constituents according to their degree of salience, so that the most informationally salient elements are placed towards the end of the clause regardless of their grammatical function. The Centering Theory developed for tracking down given information units in English and the Theory of Functional Sentence Perspective for Slavic languages provide the theoretical backgrounds. The notion of center is then extended to accommodate not only for pronominalization and exact reiteration but also for definiteness and various center pointing constructs. Center information is additionally graded and applicable to all primary constituents in an utterance. Next, this information, along with some syntactic clues is used to order correctly post-transfer constituents relying on statistical regularities.}