Measuring consistency in translation memories: a mixed-methods case study

Introduced in the early 1990s, translation memory (TM) tools have since become widely used as an aid to human translation based on commonly‐held assumptions that they save time, reduce cost, and maximise consistency. The purpose of this research is twofold: it aims to develop a method for measuring consistency in TMs; and it aims to use this method to interrogate selected TMs from the localisation industry in order to find out whether the use of TM tools does, in fact, promote consistency in translation. The research uses an explanatory, sequential mixed‐methods approach. Following a pilot study, the first phase of the research involved a quantitative study of two English‐to‐German and two English‐to‐Japanese TMs. Inconsistencies found in these TMs were categorised and counted. The research found inconsistencies of letter case, spacing, and punctuation in source texts, and inconsistent terminology, formatting, and punctuation in target texts despite the restrictive nature of TM tools. In a follow‐on qualitative phase, thirteen interviews were conducted with translators and others from the localisation industry with experience of TMs. Interviewees believed inconsistency to be a problem in translations completed using TM tools and confirmed that the findings from the quantitative phase corresponded with their experiences. Furthermore, they expressed their frustration with recent developments in TM tool functionality that, they say, do not address their needs and concerns. The thesis collates interviewees’ procedures for minimising inconsistency in TMs and suggests changes to the functionality of TM tools that may improve consistency and prove beneficial to translation professionals

Investigating the Experience of Translation Technology Labs: Pedagogical Implications

This article presents an on-going evaluation of translation technology lab sessions in a university setting. Lab sessions are practical supplements that allow student translators to develop upon what has already been learned in theory via traditional lectures. Both of these components develop the technical competencies required for professional work in translation, post-editing, and related areas. Data pertaining to the evaluation of the labs were collated and analysed using a mixed-methods approach, where the current paper focuses on the qualitative aspects. Upon examination of the data, several areas were identified as having the potential to be improved upon: attitudes, abilities, and resources. After making modifications to the labs, a follow-up study was carried out in the following academic year, the results of which were compared and contrasted with that of the first study to ascertain if the efforts to improve the labs were successful, and to guide further work

Productivity and Lexical Pragmatic Features in a Contemporary CAT Environment: An Exploratory Study in English to Japanese

As the translation profession has become more technologized, translators increasingly work within an interface that combines translation from scratch, translation memory suggestions, machine translation post-editing, and terminological resources. This study analyses user activity data from one such interface, and measures temporal effort for English to Japanese translation at the segment level. Using previous studies of translation within the framework of relevance theory as a starting point, various features and edits were identified and annotated within the texts, in order to find whether there was a relationship between their prevalence and translation effort. Although this study is exploratory in nature, there was an expectation based on previous studies that procedurally encoded utterances would be associated with greater translation effort. This expectation was complicated by the choice of a language pair in which there has been little research applying relevance theory to translation, and by contemporary research that has made the distinction between procedural and conceptual encoding appear more fluid than previously believed. Our findings are that some features that lean more towards procedural encoding (such as prevalence of pronouns and manual addition of postpositions) are associated with increased temporal effort, although the small sample size makes it impossible to generalise. Segments translated with the aid of translation memory showed the least average temporal effort, and segments translated using machine translation appeared to require more effort than translation from scratch

Comparing translator acceptability of TM and SMT outputs

This paper reports on an initial study that aims to understand whether the acceptability of translation memory (TM) among translators when contrasted with machine translation (MT) unacceptability is based on users’ ability to optimise precision in match suggestions. Seven translators were asked to rate whether 60 English-German translated segments were a usable basis for a good target translation. 30 segments were from a domain-appropriate TM without a quality threshold being set, and 30 segments were translated by a general domain statistical MT system. Participants found the MT output more useful on average, with only TM fuzzy matches of over 90% considered more useful. This result suggests that, were the MT community able to provide an accurate quality threshold to users, they would consider MT to be the more useful technology

Machine translation and post-editing training as part of a master’s programme

This article presents a description of a machine translation (MT) and post-editing course (PE), along with an MT project management module, that have been introduced in the Localisation Master’s programme at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2009 and in 2017 respectively. It covers the objectives and structure of the modules, as well as the theoretical and practical components. Additionally, it describes the project-based learning approach implemented in one of the modules, which seeks to foster creative and independent thinking, teamwork, and problem solving in unfamiliar situations, with a view to acquiring transferable skills that are likely to be in demand, regardless of the technological advances taking place in the translation industry

Consistency in translation memory corpora: a mixed-methods case study

This study investigates the prevalence and causes of inconsistency in translation memories (TM) using a sequential explanatory mixed methods design. The initial quantitative phase introduces a novel method and typology for measuring and categorizing inconsistencies in TM data. The data are the product of professional computer-aided translation of software documentation. In the follow-on qualitative phase, interviewees compare the quantitative results with their professional experience of TMs. Their confirmation of the quantitative results improves the validity of the study. The interview data also increase the utility of the research, suggesting possible causes and solutions for inconsistency. Results are presented interactively, followed by a short discussion of the findings and their consequences

Ethics and machine translation:The end user perspective

This chapter analyses existing research on the ethical implications of using MT in translation and communication, and it describes results from usability experiments that focus on the inclusion of raw and post-edited MT in multilingual products and creative texts with an emphasis on users’ feedback. It also offers suggestions on how MT content should be presented to users, readers, and consumers in general. It finally considers the ethical responsibility of all stakeholders in this new digital reality. If the ethical dimension is an ecosystem, users also have the responsibility to support products that protect language, translators, and future generations

A human evaluation of English-Irish statistical and neural machine translation

With official status in both Ireland and the EU, there is a need for high-quality English-Irish (EN-GA) machine translation (MT) systems which are suitable for use in a professional translation environment. While we have seen recent research on improving both statistical MT and neural MT for the EN-GA pair, the results of such systems have always been reported using automatic evaluation metrics. This paper provides the first human evaluation study of EN-GA MT using professional translators and in-domain (public administration) data for a more accurate depiction of the translation quality available via MT