Pronoun translation between English and Icelandic

Sammanfattning: A problem in machine translation is how to handle pronouns since languages use these differently, for example, in anaphoric reference. This essay examines what happens to the English third person pronouns he, she, and it when translated into Icelandic. Parallel corpora were prepared by tokenisation and subsequently the machine translation method word alignment was applied on the corpus. The results show that when a pronoun is used to refer to something outside the sentence (extra-sentential), this gives rise to major problems. Another problem encountered was the differences in the deictic strength between pronouns in English and Icelandic. One conclusion that can be drawn is that more research is needed as more reliable ways of handling pronouns are needed in translations.