The intuition that translations are somehow different from texts that are not translations has been around for many years, but most of the common linguistic frameworks are not comprehensive enough to account for the wealth and complexity of linguistic phenomena that make a translation a special kind of text. The present book provides a novel methodology for investigating the specific linguistic properties of translations. As this methodology is both corpus-based and driven by a functional theory of language, it is powerful enough to account for the multi-dimensional nature of cross-linguistic variation in translations and cross-lingually comparable texts.

This book deals with the computational application of systemic functional grammar (SFG) for natural language generation. More particularly, it first describes the implementation of a fragment of the grammar of German in the computational framework of KOMET-PENMAN for multilingual generation. Second, it presents a specification of explicit well-formedness constraints on syntagmatic structure which are defined in the form of typed feature structures. It thus achieves a model of systemic functional grammar that unites both the stregths of systemics, such as stratification, functional diversification, the orientation to context etc., adn the kinds of syntactic generalizations that are typically found in modern, syntagmatically-focused computational grammars. Elke Teich worked as a researcher in the KOMET project for text generation at the German National Research Centre for Information Technology, Institute for Integrated Publication and Information Systems, Darmstadt from 1990 to 1996. She is now a Research Associate at the Institute for Applied Linguistics, Translating and Interpreting, University of the Saarland, Saarbrucken.