12 mars 2015 : Productivity and quality in the post-editing of outputs from translation memories and machine translation

Conférence donnée par Dr. Ana Guerberof, Director of European Operations, Pactera
le jeudi 12 mars 2015 à 12h30 en salle M6020

Abstract
Machine-translated segments are nowadays included as fuzzy matches within the translation memory systems in the localization workflow. This study presents results on the correlation between these two types of segments in terms of productivity, final quality and experience. In order to test these variables, we setup an experiment with a group of twenty four professional translators using an on-line post-editing tool and a customized Moses statistical-base machine translation engine with a BLEU score of 0.6. The translators were asked to translate from English to Spanish, working on no-match, machine-translated and translation memory segments from the 85-94 percent value using a post-editing tool, without actually knowing the origin of each segment, and to complete an on-line questionnaire after the task. These translations were analyzed through a TER score calculation and they were reviewed by three professional translators to assess the resulting quality of the assignment. The findings suggest that translators have higher productivity and quality when using machine-translated output than when translating on their own, and that this productivity and quality is not significantly different from the values obtained when processing fuzzy matches from translation memories in the range 85-94 percent. Furthermore, translators’ experience and training seems to have an impact on the productivity and on the quality produced by translators.

Dr. Ana Guerberof Arenas has over 20 years of experience in the localisation industry and she is currently Director of European Operations at Pactera. Ana holds a PhD in Translation and Intercultural Studies from Universitat Rovira i Virgili on Productivity and quality in the post-editing of outputs from translation memories and machine translation