Enabling Monolingual Translators: Post-Editing vs. Options

We carried out a study on monolingual translators with no knowledge of the source language, but aided by post-editing and the display of translation options. On Arabic-English and Chinese-English, using standard test data and current statistical machine translation systems, 10 monolingual translators were able to translate 35% of Arabic and 28% of Chinese sentences correctly on average, with some of the participants coming close to professional bilingual performance on some of the documents. While machine translation systems have advanced greatly over the last decade, nobody seriously expects human-level performance any time soon, except for very constraint settings. But are todays systems good enough to enable monolingual speakers of the target language without knowledge of the source language to generate correct translations? And what type of assistance from machine translation is most helpful for such translators? We carried out a study that involved monolingual translators who had...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: NAACL
• Authors: Philipp Koehn
• Keywords: Computational Linguistics, Machine Translation Systems, Monolingual Translator, NAACL 2010, Statistical Machine Translation