JTEC panel report on machine translation in Japan

The goal of this report is to provide an overview of the state of the art of machine translation (MT) in Japan and to provide a comparison between Japanese and Western technology in this area. The term 'machine translation' as used here, includes both the science and technology required for automating the translation of text from one human language to another. Machine translation is viewed in Japan as an important strategic technology that is expected to play a key role in Japan's increasing participation in the world economy. MT is seen in Japan as important both for assimilating information into Japanese as well as for disseminating Japanese information throughout the world. Most of the MT systems now available in Japan are transfer-based systems. The majority of them exploit a case-frame representation of the source text as the basis of the transfer process. There is a gradual movement toward the use of deeper semantic representations, and some groups are beginning to look at interlingua-based systems

Post-editing machine translated text in a commercial setting: Observation and statistical analysis

Machine translation systems, when they are used in a commercial context for publishing purposes, are usually used in combination with human post-editing. Thus understanding human post-editing behaviour is crucial in order to maximise the benefit of machine translation systems. Though there have been a number of studies carried out on human post-editing to date, there is a lack of large-scale studies on post-editing in industrial contexts which focus on the activity in real-life settings. This study observes professional Japanese post-editors’ work and examines the effect of the amount of editing made during post-editing, source text characteristics, and post-editing behaviour, on the amount of post-editing effort. A mixed method approach was employed to both quantitatively and qualitatively analyse the data and gain detailed insights into the post-editing activity from various view points. The results indicate that a number of factors, such as sentence structure, document component types, use of product specific terms, and post-editing patterns and behaviour, have effect on the amount of post-editing effort in an intertwined manner. The findings will contribute to a better utilisation of machine translation systems in the industry as well as the development of the skills and strategies of post-editors

The social relevance of research to practice : a study of the impact of academic research on professional subtitling practitioners in Europe

The relevance of research to practice has long been debated and in recent years, the topic has returned to prominence as academics are increasingly required to demonstrate the impact of their scholarly activity outwith the academy. As the field of Audiovisual Translation is now firmly established as a sub-discipline of Translation Studies and digitalisation has fundamentally transformed subtitling practice, it is timely to explore the contribution that academic endeavours in subtitling make to its professional practice. Work to date has been based on argumentation, with scant empirical evidence and lacking the practitioner’s perspective. This study aims to investigate the extent to which academic research in subtitling impacts on professional practice. This mixed method, participant-oriented research surveyed subtitling practitioners in Europe to generate empirical data on the topic for the first time. Drawing on the sociology of the professions and the emerging field of Research Impact, this thesis deconstructs the relationship between research and practice to provide a systematic analysis of the impact of research on practice, based on the professional reality of subtitling practitioners. It highlights shortcomings in previous conceptualisations of research relevance to practice and the findings move the debate from a falsely dichotomous ‘theory versus practice’ argument towards a revised definition which accounts for a wider, more nuanced understanding of impact. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for academia, practice, industry and pedagogy

The social relevance of research to practice : a study of the impact of academic research on professional subtitling practitioners in Europe

The relevance of research to practice has long been debated and in recent years, the topic has returned to prominence as academics are increasingly required to demonstrate the impact of their scholarly activity outwith the academy. As the field of Audiovisual Translation is now firmly established as a sub-discipline of Translation Studies and digitalisation has fundamentally transformed subtitling practice, it is timely to explore the contribution that academic endeavours in subtitling make to its professional practice. Work to date has been based on argumentation, with scant empirical evidence and lacking the practitioner’s perspective. This study aims to investigate the extent to which academic research in subtitling impacts on professional practice. This mixed method, participant-oriented research surveyed subtitling practitioners in Europe to generate empirical data on the topic for the first time. Drawing on the sociology of the professions and the emerging field of Research Impact, this thesis deconstructs the relationship between research and practice to provide a systematic analysis of the impact of research on practice, based on the professional reality of subtitling practitioners. It highlights shortcomings in previous conceptualisations of research relevance to practice and the findings move the debate from a falsely dichotomous ‘theory versus practice’ argument towards a revised definition which accounts for a wider, more nuanced understanding of impact. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for academia, practice, industry and pedagogy

Recycling texts: human evaluation of example-based machine translation subtitles for DVD

This project focuses on translation reusability in audiovisual contexts. Specifically, the project seeks to establish (1) whether target language subtitles produced by an EBMT system are considered intelligible and acceptable by viewers of movies on DVD, and (2)whether a relationship exists between the ‘profiles’ of corpora used to train an EBMT system, on the one hand, and viewers’ judgements of the intelligibility and acceptability of the subtitles produced by the system, on the other. The impact of other factors, namely: whether movie-viewing subjects have knowledge of the soundtrack language; subjects’ linguistic background; and subjects’ prior knowledge of the (Harry Potter) movie clips viewed; is also investigated. Corpus profiling is based on measurements (partly using corpus-analysis tools) of three characteristics of the corpora used to train the EBMT system: the number of source language repetitions they contain; the size of the corpus; and the homogeneity of the corpus (independent variables). As a quality control measure in this prospective profiling phase, we also elicit human judgements (through a combined questionnaire and interview) on the quality of the corpus data and on the reusability in new contexts of the TL subtitles. The intelligibility and acceptability of EBMT-produced subtitles (dependent variables) are, in turn, established through end-user evaluation sessions. In these sessions 44 native German-speaking subjects view short movie clips containing EBMT-generated German subtitles, and following each clip answer questions (again, through a combined questionnaire and interview) relating to the quality characteristics mentioned above. The findings of the study suggest that an increase in corpus size along with a concomitant increase in the number of source language repetitions and a decrease in corpus homogeneity, improves the readability of the EBMT-generated subtitles. It does not, however, have a significant effect on the comprehensibility, style or wellformedness of the EBMT-generated subtitles. Increasing corpus size and SL repetitions also results in a higher number of alternative TL translations in the corpus that are deemed acceptable by evaluators in the corpus profiling phase. The research also finds that subjects are more critical of subtitles when they do not understand the soundtrack language, while subjects’ linguistic background does not have a significant effect on their judgements of the quality of EBMT-generated subtitles. Prior knowledge of the Harry Potter genre, on the other hand, appears to have an effect on how viewing subjects rate the severity of observed errors in the subtitles, and on how they rate the style of subtitles, although this effect is training corpus-dependent. The introduction of repeated subtitles did not reduce the intelligibility or acceptability of the subtitles. Overall, the findings indicate that the subtitles deemed the most acceptable when evaluated in a non-AVT environment (albeit one in which rich contextual information was available) were the same as the subtitles deemed the most acceptable in an AVT environment, although richer data were gathered from the AVT environment