NT Clause Complex Framework defines a clause complex as a combination of NT clauses through component sharing and logic-semantic relationship. This paper clarifies the existence of component sharing mechanism in both English and Chinese clause complexes, illustrates the differences in component sharing between the two languages, and introduces a formal annotation scheme to represent clause-complex level structural transformations. Under the guidance of the annotation scheme, the English-Chinese Clause Alignment Corpus is built. It is believed that this corpus will aid comparative linguistic studies, translation studies and machine translation studies by providing abundant formal and computable samples for English-Chinese structural transformations on the clause complex level.

A clause complex consists of clauses, which are connected by component sharing relations and logic-semantic relations. Hence, clause-complex level structural transformations in translation are concerned with the expression adjustment of these two types of relations. In this paper, a formal scheme for tagging structural transformations in English-Chinese translation is designed. The annotation scheme include 3 steps operated on two grammatical levels: parsing an English clause complex into constructs and assembling construct translations on the clause complex level; translating constructs independently on the clause level. The assembling step involves 2 operations: performing operation functions and inserting Chinese words. The corpus annotation shows that it is feasible to divide structural transformations in English-Chinese translation into 2 levels. The corpus, which unfolds formally the operations of clause-complex level structural transformations, would help to improve the end-to-end translation of complicated sentences.