Using speech technology in the translation process workflow in international organizations: A quantitative and qualitative study

Pierrette Bouillon, Jeevanthi Liyanapathirana


Abstract
In international organizations, the growing demand for translations has increased the need for post-editing. Different studies show that automatic speech recognition systems have the potential to increase the productivity of the translation process as well as the quality. In this talk, we will explore the possibilities of using speech in the translation process by conducting a post-editing experiment with three professional translators in an international organization. Our experiment consisted of comparing three translation methods: speaking the translation with MT as an inspiration (RESpeaking), post-editing the MT suggestions by typing (PE), and editing the MT suggestion using speech (SPE). BLEU and HTER scores were used to compare the three methods. Our study shows that translators did more edits under condition RES, whereas in SPE, the resulting translations were closer to the reference according to the BLEU score and required less edits. Time taken to translate was the least in SPE followed by PE, RES methods and the translators preferred using speech to typing. These results show the potential of speech when it is coupled with post-editing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first quantitative study conducted on using post-editing and speech together in large scale international organizations.
Anthology ID:
2021.mtsummit-up.26
Volume:
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVIII: Users and Providers Track
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Virtual
Editors:
Janice Campbell, Ben Huyck, Stephen Larocca, Jay Marciano, Konstantin Savenkov, Alex Yanishevsky
Venue:
MTSummit
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Note:
Pages:
382–395
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.mtsummit-up.26
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pierrette Bouillon and Jeevanthi Liyanapathirana. 2021. Using speech technology in the translation process workflow in international organizations: A quantitative and qualitative study. In Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVIII: Users and Providers Track, pages 382–395, Virtual. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
Using speech technology in the translation process workflow in international organizations: A quantitative and qualitative study (Bouillon & Liyanapathirana, MTSummit 2021)
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Presentation:
 2021.mtsummit-up.26.Presentation.pdf