In this submission, I would like to share my experiences with the software DeepL and the comparison analysis I have made with human subtitling offered by the DVD version of the corpus I have chosen as the topic of my study – the eight Seasons of Game of Thrones. The idea is to study if the version proposed by an automatic translation program could be used as a first draft for the professional subtitler. It is expected that the latter would work on the form of the subtitles, that is to say mainly on their length, in a second step.

Parallel corpora constitute a unique re-source for providing assistance to human translators. The selection and preparation of the parallel corpora also conditions the quality of the resulting MT engine. Since Croatian is a national language and Italian is officially recognized as a minority lan-guage in seven cities and twelve munici-palities of Istria County, a large amount of parallel texts is produced on a daily basis. However, there have been no attempts in using these texts for compiling a parallel corpus. A domain-specific sentence-aligned parallel Croatian-Italian corpus of administrative texts would be of high value in creating different language tools and resources. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to explore the value of parallel documents which are publicly available mostly in pdf format and to investigate the use of automatically-built dictionaries in corpus compilation. The effects that a document format and, consequently sentence splitting, and the dictionary input have on the sentence alignment process are manually evaluated.

While a number of studies have shown evidence of translationese phenomena, that is, statistical differences between original texts and translated texts (Gellerstam, 1986), results of studies searching for translationese features in postedited texts (what has been called ”posteditese” (Daems et al., 2017)) have presented mixed results. This paper reports a preliminary study aimed at identifying the presence of post-editese features in machine-translated post-edited texts and at understanding how they differ from translationese features. We test the influence of factors such as post-editing (PE) levels (full vs. light), translation proficiency (professionals vs. students) and text domain (news vs. literary). Results show evidence of post-editese features, especially in light PE texts and in certain domains.

We propose a metric for machine translation evaluation based on frame semantics which does not require the use of reference translations or human corrections, but is aimed at comparing original and translated output directly. The metrics is described on the basis of an existing manual frame-semantic annotation of a parallel corpus with an English original and a Brazilian Portuguese and a German translation. We discuss implications of our metrics design, including the potential of scaling it for multiple languages.

Recent advances in artificial neural networks now have a great impact on translation technology. A considerable achievement was reached in this field with the publication of L’Apprentissage Profond. This book, originally written in English (Deep Learning), was entirely machine-translated into French and post-edited by several experts. In this context, it appears essential to have a clear vision of the performance of MT tools. Providing an evaluation of NMT is precisely the aim of the present research paper. To accomplish this objective, a framework for error categorisation was built and a comparative analysis of the raw translation output and the post-edited version was performed with the purpose of identifying recurring patterns of errors. The findings showed that even though some grammatical errors were spotted, the output was generally correct from a linguistic point of view. The most recurring errors are linked to the specialised terminology employed in this book. Further errors include parts of text that were not translated as well as edits based on stylistic preferences. The major part of the output was not acceptable as such and required several edits per segment, but some sentences were of publishable quality and were therefore left untouched in the final version.

We use a range of morpho-syntactic features inspired by research in register studies (e.g. Biber, 1995; Neumann, 2013) and translation studies (e.g. Ilisei et al., 2010; Zanettin, 2013; Kunilovskaya and Kutuzov, 2018) to reveal the association between translationese and human translation quality. Translationese is understood as any statistical deviations of translations from non-translations (Baker, 1993) and is assumed to affect the fluency of translations, rendering them foreign-sounding and clumsy of wording and structure. This connection is often posited or implied in the studies of translationese or translational varieties (De Sutter et al., 2017), but is rarely directly tested. Our 45 features include frequencies of selected morphological forms and categories, some types of syntactic structures and relations, as well as several overall text measures extracted from Universal Dependencies annotation. The research corpora include English-to-Russian professional and student translations of informational or argumentative newspaper texts and a comparable corpus of non-translated Russian. Our results indicate lack of direct association between translationese and quality in our data: while our features distinguish translations and non-translations with the near perfect accuracy, the performance of the same algorithm on the quality classes barely exceeds the chance level.

The translation of wordplay is one of the most extensively researched problems in translation studies, but it has attracted little attention in the fields of natural language processing and machine translation. This is because today’s language technologies treat anomalies and ambiguities in the input as things that must be resolved in favour of a single “correct” interpretation, rather than preserved and interpreted in their own right. But if computers cannot yet process such creative language on their own, can they at least provide specialized support to translation professionals? In this paper, I survey the state of the art relevant to computational processing of humorous wordplay and put forth a vision of how existing theories, resources, and technologies could be adapted and extended to support interactive, computer-assisted translation.

The automatic evaluation of machine translation (MT) has proven to be a very significant research topic. Most automatic evaluation methods focus on the evaluation of the output of MT as they compute similarity scores that represent translation quality. This work targets on the performance of MT evaluation. We present a general scheme for learning to classify parallel translations, using linguistic information, of two MT model outputs and one human (reference) translation. We present three experiments to this scheme using neural networks (NN). One using string based hand-crafted features (Exp1), the second using automatically trained embeddings from the reference and the two MT outputs (one from a statistical machine translation (SMT) model and the other from a neural ma-chine translation (NMT) model), which are learned using NN (Exp2), and the third experiment (Exp3) that combines information from the other two experiments. The languages involved are English (EN), Greek (GR) and Italian (IT) segments are educational in domain. The proposed language-independent learning scheme which combines information from the two experiments (experiment 3) achieves higher classification accuracy compared with models using BLEU score information as well as other classification approaches, such as Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM).

In this study, we compare the output quality of two MT systems, a statistical (SMT) and a neural (NMT) engine, customised for Swiss Post’s Language Service using the same training data. We focus on the point of view of professional translators and investigate how they perceive the differences between the MT output and a human reference (namely deletions, substitutions, insertions and word order). Our findings show that translators more frequently consider these differences to be errors in SMT than NMT, and that deletions are the most serious errors in both architectures. We also observe lower agreement on differences to be corrected in NMT than in SMT, suggesting that errors are easier to identify in SMT. These findings confirm the ability of NMT to produce correct paraphrases, which could also explain why BLEU is often considered as an inadequate metric to evaluate the performance of NMT systems.

The Chinese/English Political Interpreting Corpus (CEPIC) is a new electronic and open access resource developed for translators and interpreters, especially those working with political text types. Over 6 million word tokens in size, the online corpus consists of transcripts of Chinese (Cantonese & Putonghua) / English political speeches and their translated and interpreted texts. It includes rich meta-data and is POS-tagged and annotated with prosodic and paralinguistic features that are of concern to spoken language and interpreting. The online platform of the CEPIC features main functions including Keyword Search, Word Collocation and Expanded Keyword in Context, which are illustrated in the paper. The CEPIC can shed light on online translation and interpreting corpora development in the future.

Modern translation QA tools are the latest attempt to overcome the inevitable subjective component of human revisers. This paper analyzes the current situation in the translation industry in respect to those tools and their relationship with CAT tools. The adoption of international standards has set the basic frame that defines “quality”. Because of the clear impossibility to develop a universal QA tool, all of the existing ones have in common a wide variety of settings for the user to choose from. A brief comparison is made between most popular standalone QA tools. In order to verify their results in practice, QA outputs from two of those tools have been compared. Polls that cover a period of 12 years have been collected. Their participants explained what practices they adopted in order to guarantee quality.

The paper presents a study of the French Imparfait and its functional equivalents in Bulgarian and English in view of applications in machine translation and error analysis. The aims of the study are: 1/ based on the analysis of a corpus of text, to validate/revise earlier research on the values of the French Imparfait, 2/ to define the contextual factors pointing to the realisation of one or another value of the forms, 3/ based on the analysis of aligned translations, to identify the translation equivalents of these values, 4/ to formulate translation rules, 5/ based on the analysis of the translation rules, to refine the annotation modules of the environment used – the NBU e-Platform for language teaching and research.

This article presents a multi-faceted analysis of a subset of interpreted conference speeches from the WAW corpus for the English-Arabic language pair. We analyze several speakers and interpreters variables via manual annotation and automatic methods. We propose a new automatic method for calculating interpreters’ décalage based on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and automatic alignment of named entities and content words between speaker and interpreter. The method is evaluated by two human annotators who have expertise in interpreting and Interpreting Studies and shows highly satisfactory results, accompanied with a high inter-annotator agreement. We provide insights about the relations of speakers’ variables, interpreters’ variables and décalage and discuss them from Interpreting Studies and interpreting practice point of view. We had interesting findings about interpreters behavior which need to be extended to a large number of conference sessions in our future research.

The emergence of China as a global economic power in the 21st Century has brought about surging needs for cross-lingual and cross-cultural mediation, typically performed by translators. Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Language Engineering have been bolstered by Machine learning and suitable Big Data cultivation. They have helped to meet some of the translator’s needs, though the technical specialists have not kept pace with the practical and expanding requirements in language mediation. One major technical and linguistic hurdle involves words outside the vocabulary of the translator or the lexical database he/she consults, especially Multi-Word Expressions (Compound Words) in technical subjects. A further problem is in the multiplicity of renditions of a term in the target language. This paper discusses a proactive approach following the successful extraction and application of sizable bilingual Multi-Word Expressions (Compound Words) for language mediation in technical subjects, which do not fall within the expertise of typical translators, who have inadequate appreciation of the range of new technical tools available to help him/her. Our approach draws on the personal reflections of translators and teachers of translation and is based on the prior R&D efforts relating to 300,000 comparable Chinese-English patents. The subsequent protocol we have developed aims to be proactive in meeting four identified practical challenges in technical translation (e.g. patents). It has broader economic implication in the Age of Big Data (Tsou et al, 2015) and Trade War, as the workload, if not, the challenges, increasingly cannot be met by currently available front-line translators. We shall demonstrate how new tools can be harnessed to spearhead the application of language technology not only in language mediation but also in the “teaching” and “learning” of translation. It shows how a better appreciation of their needs may enhance the contributions of the technical specialists, and thus enhance the resultant synergetic benefits.

Neural machine translation (NMT) was shown to produce more fluent output than phrase-based statistical (PBMT) and rule-based machine translation (RBMT). However, improved fluency makes it more difficult for post editors to identify and correct adequacy errors, because unlike RBMT and SMT, in NMT adequacy errors are frequently not anticipated by fluency errors. Omissions and additions of content in otherwise flawlessly fluent NMT output are the most prominent types of such adequacy errors, which can only be detected with reference to source texts. This contribution explores the degree of semantic similarity between source texts, NMT output and post edited output. In this way, computational semantic similarity scores (cosine similarity) are related to human quality judgments. The analyses are based on publicly available NMT post editing data annotated for errors in three language pairs (EN-DE, EN-LV, EN-HR) with the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM). Methodologically, this contribution tests whether cross-language aligned word embeddings as the sole source of semantic information mirror human error annotation.

Technologies and their constant updates and innovative nature drastically and irreversibly transformed this small business into a leading brand on the translation market, along with just few other LSPs integrating translation software solutions. Now, we are constantly following the new developments in software updates and online platforms and we are successfully keeping up with any new trend in the field of translation, localization, transcreation, revision, post-editing, etc. Ultimately, we are positive that proper implementation of technology (with focus on quality, cost and time) and hard work are the stepping stones in the way to become a trusted translation services provider.

Technology is a big challenge and raises many questions and issues when it comes to its application in the translation process, but translation’s biggest problem is not technology; it is rather how technology is perceived by translators. MT developers and researchers should take into account this perception and move towards a more democratized approach to include the base of the translation industry and perhaps its more valuable asset, the translators.

In this article, we describe how machine translation is used for post-editing at TransPerfect and the ways in which we optimise the workflow. This includes MT evaluation, MT engine customisation, leveraging MT suggestions compared to TM matches, and the lessons learnt from implementing MT at a large scale.