  It is often argued that accurate machine translation requires reference to
contextual knowledge for the correct treatment of linguistic phenomena such as
dropped arguments and accurate lexical selection. One of the historical
arguments in favor of the interlingua approach has been that, since it revolves
around a deep semantic representation, it is better able to handle the types of
linguistic phenomena that are seen as requiring a knowledge-based approach. In
this paper we present an alternative approach, exemplified by a prototype
system for machine translation of English and Korean which is implemented in
Synchronous TAGs. This approach is essentially transfer based, and uses
semantic feature unification for accurate lexical selection of polysemous
verbs. The same semantic features, when combined with a discourse model which
stores previously mentioned entities, can also be used for the recovery of
topicalized arguments. In this paper we concentrate on the translation of
Korean to English.
