Machine translation (Koehn, 2010) lets us discover translation correspondences in bilingual texts, but a word and its translation often do not cover the exact same semantic space: distinct word senses might translate differently (Gale et al., 1992;Diab and Resnik, 2002, among others); semantic relations and associations do not always translate, an important issue when constructing multilingual ontologies (Fellbaum and Vossen, 2012); and words in parallel text might be translated non-literally due to lexical gaps (Santos, 1990;Bentivogli and Pianta, 2000) or decisions of the translator, as becomes clear when comparing multiple translations of the same source text (Bhagat and Hovy, 2013).
correct word translations found in parallel corpora exhibit a variety of relations including equivalence, hypernymy, and meronymy.