scholarly journals Machine Translation Quality of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies ◽  
Zakaryia Mustafa Almahasees

Machine translation (MT) systems are widely used throughout the world freely or at low cost. The spread of MT entails a thorough analysis of translation produced by such translation systems. The present study evaluates the capacity of two MT systems-Google Translate and Microsoft Bing translator- in translation from Arabic into English of Khalil Gibran’s literary masterpiece - The Prophet (2000). The question that arises in the study is could we trust MT in the translation of literary masterpieces across languages and particularly from Arabic to English? How close does MT output to human translation? To conduct that, the study is adopted Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) of Papineni (2000). MT output analysis showed that MT is not accurate, intelligible and natural in translating literary texts due to the difficulty of literary texts, as they are full of metaphors and cultural specifications. Besides, there are some linguistic errors: lexical, syntactic and misinformation. The study also found that both systems provided similar translation for the same input due to either the use of similar MT approach or learning from previous translated texts. Moreover, both systems in some instances, achieve good results at the word level, but bad results at collocation units. The study also showed that automatic translation is insufficient for providing a full analysis of MT output because all automatic metrics are misleading due to dependence on text similarity to a reference human translation. For future research, the study recommended conducting a correlative study that combines manual and automatic evaluation methods to ensure best analysis of MT output. Machine Translation (MT) is still far from reaching fully automatic translation of a quality obtained by human translators.

Author(s):  
Carlos Eduardo Silva ◽  
Lincoln Fernandes

This paper describes COPA-TRAD Version 2.0, a parallel corpus-based system developed at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) for translation research, teaching and practice. COPA-TRAD enables the user to investigate the practices of professional translators by identifying translational patterns related to a particular element or linguistic pattern. In addition, the system allows for the comparison between human translation and automatic translation provided by three well-known machine translation systems available on the Internet (Google Translate, Microsoft Translator and Yandex). Currently, COPA-TRAD incorporates five subcorpora (Children's Literature, Literary Texts, Meta-Discourse in Translation, Subtitles and Legal Texts) and provides the following tools: parallel concordancer, monolingual concordancer, wordlist and a DIY Tool that enables the user to create his own parallel disposable corpus. The system also provides a POS-tagging tool interface to analyze and classify the parts of speech of a text.


2021 ◽  
Vol 284 ◽  
pp. 08001
Author(s):  
Ilya Ulitkin ◽  
Irina Filippova ◽  
Natalia Ivanova ◽  
Alexey Poroykov

We report on various approaches to automatic evaluation of machine translation quality and describe three widely used methods. These methods, i.e. methods based on string matching and n-gram models, make it possible to compare the quality of machine translation to reference translation. We employ modern metrics for automatic evaluation of machine translation quality such as BLEU, F-measure, and TER to compare translations made by Google and PROMT neural machine translation systems with translations obtained 5 years ago, when statistical machine translation and rule-based machine translation algorithms were employed by Google and PROMT, respectively, as the main translation algorithms [6]. The evaluation of the translation quality of candidate texts generated by Google and PROMT with reference translation using an automatic translation evaluation program reveal significant qualitative changes as compared with the results obtained 5 years ago, which indicate a dramatic improvement in the work of the above-mentioned online translation systems. Ways to improve the quality of machine translation are discussed. It is shown that modern systems of automatic evaluation of translation quality allow errors made by machine translation systems to be identified and systematized, which will enable the improvement of the quality of translation by these systems in the future.


Author(s):  
Yana Fedorko ◽  
Tetiana Yablonskaya

The article is focused on peculiarities of English and Chinese political discourse translation into Ukrainian. The advantages and disadvantages of machine translation are described on the basis of linguistic analysis of online Google Translate and M-Translate systems. The reasons of errors in translation are identified and the need of post-correction to improve the quality of translation is wanted. Key words: political discourse, automatic translation, online machine translation systems, machine translation quality assessment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-133
Author(s):  
Ani Ananyan ◽  
Roza Avagyan

Along with the development and widespread dissemination of translation by artificial intelligence, it is becoming increasingly important to continuously evaluate and improve its quality and to use it as a tool for the modern translator. In our research, we compared five sentences translated from Armenian into Russian and English by Google Translator, Yandex Translator and two models of the translation system of the Armenian company Avromic to find out how effective these translation systems are when working in Armenian. It was necessary to find out how effective it would be to use them as a translation tool and in the learning process by further editing the translation. As there is currently no comprehensive and successful method of human metrics for machine translation, we have developed our own evaluation method and criteria by studying the world's most well-known methods of evaluation for automatic translation. We have used the post-editorial distance evaluation criterion as well. In the example of one sentence in the article, we have presented in detail the evaluation process according to the selected and developed criteria. At the end we have presented the results of the research and made appropriate conclusions.


Author(s):  
A.V. Kozina ◽  
Yu.S. Belov

Automatically assessing the quality of machine translation is an important yet challenging task for machine translation research. Translation quality assessment is understood as predicting translation quality without reference to the source text. Translation quality depends on the specific machine translation system and often requires post-editing. Manual editing is a long and expensive process. Since the need to quickly determine the quality of translation increases, its automation is required. In this paper, we propose a quality assessment method based on ensemble supervised machine learning methods. The bilingual corpus WMT 2019 for the EnglishRussian language pair was used as data. The text data volume is 17089 sentences, 85% of the data was used for training, and 15% for testing the model. Linguistic functions extracted from the text in the source and target languages were used as features for training the system, since it is these characteristics that can most accurately characterize the translation in terms of quality. The following tools were used for feature extraction: a free language modeling tool based on SRILM and a Stanford POS Tagger parts of speech tagger. Before training the system, the text was preprocessed. The model was trained using three regression methods: Bagging, Extra Tree, and Random Forest. The algorithms were implemented in the Python programming language using the Scikit learn library. The parameters of the random forest method have been optimized using a grid search. The performance of the model was assessed by the mean absolute error MAE and the root mean square error RMSE, as well as by the Pearsоn coefficient, which determines the correlation with human judgment. Testing was carried out using three machine translation systems: Google and Bing neural systems, Mouses statistical machine translation systems based on phrases and based on syntax. Based on the results of the work, the method of additional trees showed itself best. In addition, for all categories of indicators under consideration, the best results are achieved using the Google machine translation system. The developed method showed good results close to human judgment. The system can be used for further research in the task of assessing the quality of translation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 145-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zaixiang Zheng ◽  
Hao Zhou ◽  
Shujian Huang ◽  
Lili Mou ◽  
Xinyu Dai ◽  
...  

Existing neural machine translation systems do not explicitly model what has been translated and what has not during the decoding phase. To address this problem, we propose a novel mechanism that separates the source information into two parts: translated Past contents and untranslated Future contents, which are modeled by two additional recurrent layers. The Past and Future contents are fed to both the attention model and the decoder states, which provides Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems with the knowledge of translated and untranslated contents. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves the performance in Chinese-English, German-English, and English-German translation tasks. Specifically, the proposed model outperforms the conventional coverage model in terms of both the translation quality and the alignment error rate.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miquel Esplà-Gomis ◽  
Felipe Sánchez-Martínez ◽  
Mikel Forcada

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-123
Author(s):  
Xiangling Wang ◽  
Tingting Wang ◽  
Ricardo Muñoz Martín ◽  
Yanfang Jia

AbstractThis is a report on an empirical study on the usability for translation trainees of neural machine translation systems when post-editing (mtpe). Sixty Chinese translation trainees completed a questionnaire on their perceptions of mtpe's usability. Fifty of them later performed both a post-editing task and a regular translation task, designed to examine mtpe's usability by comparing their performance in terms of text processing speed, effort, and translation quality. Contrasting data collected by the questionnaire, keylogging, eyetracking and retrospective reports we found that, compared with regular, unaided translation, mtpe's usefulness in performance was remarkable: (1) it increased translation trainees' text processing speed and also improved their translation quality; (2) mtpe's ease of use in performance was partly proved in that it significantly reduced informants' effort as measured by (a) fixation duration and fixation counts; (b) total task time; and (c) the number of insertion keystrokes and total keystrokes. However, (3) translation trainees generally perceived mtpe to be useful to increase productivity, but they were skeptical about its use to improve quality. They were neutral towards the ease of use of mtpe.


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