A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats? Quality Correlation between Human Translation and Machine Assisted Translation
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.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.mtsummit-up.13
- Volume:
- Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVIII: Users and Providers Track
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Virtual
- Venue:
- MTSummit
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
- Note:
- Pages:
- 166–174
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.mtsummit-up.13
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Evelyn Yang Garland and Rony Gao. 2021. A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats? Quality Correlation between Human Translation and Machine Assisted Translation. In Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVIII: Users and Providers Track, pages 166–174, Virtual. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats? Quality Correlation between Human Translation and Machine Assisted Translation (Yang Garland & Gao, MTSummit 2021)