Toward Determining the Comprehensibility of Machine Translations

Abstract

Economic globalization and the needs of the intelligence community have brought ma-chine translation into the forefront. There are not enough skilled human translators to meet the growing demand for high quality transla-tions or "good enough" translations that suf-fice only to enable understanding. Much research has been done in creating transla-tion systems to aid human translators and to evaluate the output of these systems. Metrics for the latter have primarily focused on im-proving the overall quality of entire test sets but not on gauging the understanding of in-dividual sentences or paragraphs. Therefore, we have focused on developing a theory of translation effectiveness by isolating a set of translation variables and measuring their ef-fects on the comprehension of translations. In the following study, we focus on investi-gating how certain linguistic permutations, omissions, and insertions affect the under-standing of translated texts.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2012
Accession Number
ADA562692

Entities

People

  • Astrid Schmidt-nielsen
  • Dennis J. Perzanowski
  • Kalyan Gupta
  • Linda Sibert
  • Tucker Maney

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Communities
  • Comprehension
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Computational Science
  • Computers
  • Detection
  • Error Analysis
  • Errors
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Machine Translation
  • Military Research
  • Space Exploration
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Test Sets
  • Translations
  • Translators

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Economics

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - DoD AI Strategy
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation