User-based chunking

Sometimes in translations it would be useful to be able to mark particular segments/chunks not for translation, but to give them an analysis for the purposes of translation.

Some use-cases:

• Product names, long named entities

• • Microsoft 365 for business is the right choice for your company
  • A very popular film adaptation is "Gone with the Wind".

• The use of quoted chunks as modifiers

• Quotations in a second (or third) language

• • And then he came back and said "Bu ne lan?"

Limitations

• The words in the chunk should be contiguous.

Solutions

User-based, online

1. A user could mark in an interface that they don't want a particular span translating, each word would be prefixed then with a symbol. Sequences of these words would be merged by -separable or something like it. And the whole chunk would be either given a default tag, a tag determined by a classifier or a tag determined by rules.

Microsoft 365 for business is right choice for your company

+Microsoft +365 +for +business is right choice for your company

after lt-proc | agger:
^+Microsoft/Microsoft<np><al>$ ^+365/365<num>$ ^+for/for<pr>$ ^+business/business<n>$ ^is/be<vbser><pres><p3><sg>$ ^the/the<det><def><sp>$ right choice for your company

after apertium-separable:
^+Microsoft 365 for business/Microsoft 365 for business<np><al>$ ^is/be<vbser><pres><p3><sg>$ the right choice for your company.

after bidix lookup:
^+Microsoft 365 for business/Microsoft 365 for business<np><al>/Microsoft 365 for business<np><al>$ ^is/be<vbser><pres><p3><sg>/ser<vbser><pres><p3><sg>$ ^the/the<det><def><sp>/el<det><def><GD><ND>$ right choice for your company.

after apertium-transfer:
^+Microsoft 365 for business<np><al>$ ^ser<vbser><pri><p3><sg>$ ^el<det><def><f><sg>$ ... 
 
Microsoft 365 for business és la ...

Automatic

For dealing with quoted text we might be better to have an automatic system that does language identification combined with rules. The same technique could be used, words that receive an analysis would get the surface form prefixed with + after running through the module.

Engine-based, offline

• Discovering these kind of things should be possible using only monolingual corpora, or resources such as Wikipedia.