EXPERIMENTS IN LANGUAGE TRANSLATION: TECHNICAL ENGLISH-TO-VIETNAMESE

Abstract

The paper documents the results of a series of experiments on translating technical material from English to Vietnamese. The paper addresses the questions of translation speed, number of errors, and quality assessment. Three different methods for measuring the quality of translations are examined; back-translation, knowledge testing, and performance testing. Translation costs and means of writing translatable English are also reviewed. It is concluded that: 400 words per hour is a reasonable speed expectation for technical material; quality of translation significantly affects performance and quality may be sampled by any of the means tested; costs can be reduced by several methods but $70 per thousand words is a reasonable estimate.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 01, 1970
Accession Number
AD0711599

Entities

People

  • H. W. Sinaiko
  • Richard W. Brislin

Organizations

  • Institute for Defense Analyses

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Human Systems
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Air Force
  • Aircrafts
  • Helicopters
  • Language
  • Language Translation
  • Linguistics
  • Measurement
  • Military Personnel
  • Performance Tests
  • Personnel Management
  • Psychology
  • Quality Control
  • Reliability
  • Relief Valves
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Test Methods

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Systems Analysis and Design