What’s the Difference Between Professional Human and Machine Translation? A Blind Multi-language Study on Domain-specific MT

Lukas Fischer, Samuel Läubli


Abstract
Machine translation (MT) has been shown to produce a number of errors that require human post-editing, but the extent to which professional human translation (HT) contains such errors has not yet been compared to MT. We compile pre-translated documents in which MT and HT are interleaved, and ask professional translators to flag errors and post-edit these documents in a blind evaluation. We find that the post-editing effort for MT segments is only higher in two out of three language pairs, and that the number of segments with wrong terminology, omissions, and typographical problems is similar in HT.
Anthology ID:
2020.eamt-1.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Lisboa, Portugal
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
215–224
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.eamt-1.23
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lukas Fischer and Samuel Läubli. 2020. What’s the Difference Between Professional Human and Machine Translation? A Blind Multi-language Study on Domain-specific MT. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pages 215–224, Lisboa, Portugal. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
What’s the Difference Between Professional Human and Machine Translation? A Blind Multi-language Study on Domain-specific MT (Fischer & Läubli, EAMT 2020)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2020.eamt-1.23.pdf