A Corpus Study on Verb Tenses in Dutch and English Conditionals

Abstract

The goal of this research is to examine and discover the differences in verb tense usage of English and Dutch conditional sentences. For this analysis the Europarl Corpus is used, together with tools from the Time in Translation project. Fragments containing conditional sentences were extracted from the corpus and then annotated with the correct verb tense. Results show that English type zero and type one conditionals often get directly translated into a corresponding similar verb tense in Dutch, e.g. simple present -> onvoltooid tegenwoordige tijd. English type two conditionals get translated into a variety of verb tenses. This is possibly due to the dissimilarities in semantics between the different potential Dutch translated verb forms being minimal. These findings could prove useful when working with Rule Based Machine Translation systems.