The use of automatic evaluation metrics to assess Machine Translation (MT) quality is well established in the translation industry. Whereas it is relatively easy to cover the word- and character-based metrics in an MT course, it is less obvious to integrate the newer neural metrics. In this paper we discuss how we introduced the topic of MT quality assessment in a course for translation students. We selected three English source texts, each having a different difficulty level and style, and let the students translate the texts into their L1 and reflect upon translation difficulty. Afterwards, the students were asked to assess MT quality for the same texts using different methods and to critically reflect upon obtained results. The students had access to the MATEO web interface, which contains word- and character-based metrics as well as neural metrics. The students used two different reference translations: their own translations and professional translations of the three texts. We not only synthesise the comments of the students, but also present the results of some cross-lingual analyses on nine different language pairs.

We present MAchine Translation Evaluation Online (MATEO), a project that aims to facilitate machine translation (MT) evaluation by means of an easy-to-use interface that can evaluate given machine translations with a battery of automatic metrics. It caters to both experienced and novice users who are working with MT, such as MT system builders, teachers and students of (machine) translation, and researchers.

This study focuses on English-Dutch literary translations that were created in a professional environment using an MT-enhanced workflow consisting of a three-stage process of automatic translation followed by post-editing and (mainly) monolingual revision. We compare the three successive versions of the target texts. We used different automatic metrics to measure the (dis)similarity between the consecutive versions and analyzed the linguistic characteristics of the three translation variants. Additionally, on a subset of 200 segments, we manually annotated all errors in the machine translation output and classified the different editing actions that were carried out. The results show that more editing occurred during revision than during post-editing and that the types of editing actions were different.

This project aims to study the impact of adapting neural machine translation (NMT) systems through translation exemplars, determine the optimal similarity metric(s) for retrieving informative exemplars, and, verify the usefulness of this approach for domain adaptation of NMT systems.

The ArisToCAT project aims to assess the comprehensibility of ‘raw’ (unedited) MT output for readers who can only rely on the MT output. In this project description, we summarize the main results of the project and present future work.

Several studies (covering many language pairs and translation tasks) have demonstrated that translation quality has improved enormously since the emergence of neural machine translation systems. This raises the question whether such systems are able to produce high-quality translations for more creative text types such as literature and whether they are able to generate coherent translations on document level. Our study aimed to investigate these two questions by carrying out a document-level evaluation of the raw NMT output of an entire novel. We translated Agatha Christie’s novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles with Google’s NMT system from English into Dutch and annotated it in two steps: first all fluency errors, then all accuracy errors. We report on the overall quality, determine the remaining issues, compare the most frequent error types to those in general-domain MT, and investigate whether any accuracy and fluency errors co-occur regularly. Additionally, we assess the inter-annotator agreement on the first chapter of the novel.

We present a simple yet powerful data augmentation method for boosting Neural Machine Translation (NMT) performance by leveraging information retrieved from a Translation Memory (TM). We propose and test two methods for augmenting NMT training data with fuzzy TM matches. Tests on the DGT-TM data set for two language pairs show consistent and substantial improvements over a range of baseline systems. The results suggest that this method is promising for any translation environment in which a sizeable TM is available and a certain amount of repetition across translations is to be expected, especially considering its ease of implementation.

We present the highlights of the now finished 4-year SCATE project. It was completed in February 2018 and funded by the Flemish Government IWT-SBO, project No. 130041.1