@inproceedings{yang-garland-gao-2021-rising,
    title = "A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats? Quality Correlation between Human Translation and Machine Assisted Translation",
    author = "Yang Garland, Evelyn  and
      Gao, Rony",
    editor = "Campbell, Janice  and
      Huyck, Ben  and
      Larocca, Stephen  and
      Marciano, Jay  and
      Savenkov, Konstantin  and
      Yanishevsky, Alex",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVIII: Users and Providers Track",
    month = aug,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Virtual",
    publisher = "Association for Machine Translation in the Americas",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2021.mtsummit-up.13/",
    pages = "166--174",
    abstract = "Does the human who produces the best translation without Machine Translation (MT) also produce the best translation with the assistance of MT? Our empirical study has found a strong correlation between the quality of pure human translation (HT) and that of machine-assisted translation (MAT) produced by the same translator (Pearson correlation coefficient 0.85, p=0.007). Data from the study also indicates a more concentrated distribution of the MAT quality scores than that of the HT scores. Additional insights will also be discussed during the presentation. This study has two prominent features: the participation of professional translators (mostly ATA members, English-into-Chinese) as subjects, and the rigorous quality evaluation by multiple professional translators (all ATA certified) using ATA{'}s time-tested certification exam grading metrics. Despite a major limitation in sample size, our findings provide a strong indication of correlation between HT and MAT quality, adding to the body of evidence in support of further studies on larger scales."
}