Fix Word Order

In Hindi, the canonical word order is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV), as contrasted with a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order in English. As an aside, Hindi also allows alternate word orders such as OSV (a phenomenon known as 'scrambling'), but MT can focus on generating just the canonical SOV order.

Hindi is also a head-final language, meaning that the head-word of a phrase (for e.g., the preposition 'by' is the head-word of the preposition phrase 'by the dog') is usually the final word of the phrase. Thus, Hindi has postpositions (as contrasted with prepositions in English). Adverbs (other than sentential adverbs) and negation also usually precede the verb, while auxiliary verbs and modals follow the verb.

When a verb has multiple preposition phrases as optional arguments (such as ‘by the dog in the park’), they can be reordered in Hindi, in order to move the Agent (i.e. 'the dog') closer to the verb for greater readability. However, when a preposition phrase modifies a noun phrase (for e.g., 'procession of memories'), the corresponding postposition phrase in Hindi will usually precede the noun phrase; the postposition will be inflected for the Number and Gender of the Head Noun (i.e. 'yAdoN kI bArAt' since the translation of 'procession' is defined as bArAt-Feminine in Hindi).

When an argument or an adjunct of a finite verb is an infinitive clause, (for e.g., ‘He wanted to learn Hindi’), the infinitive clause will usually precede the finite verb and will have the canonical SOV order internally (i.e. ‘He Hindi to learn wanted’).

Applying the above changes in word order, we get the following intermediate form: