The Added Value of Free Online MT Services

The Added Value of Free Online MT Services: Confidence Boosters for Linguistically-challenged Internet Users, a Case Study for the Language Pair Italian-English Federico Gaspari School of Informatics University of Manchester PO Box 88, Manchester M60 1QD United Kingdom F.Gaspari@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk Abstract This paper reports on an experiment inves- tigating how effective free online machine translation (MT) is in helping Internet us- ers to access the contents of websites writ- ten only in languages they do not know. This study explores the extent to which us- ing Internet-based MT tools affects the confidence of web-surfers in the reliability of the information they find on websites available only in languages unfamiliar to them. The results of a case study for the language pair Italian-English involving 101 participants show that the chances of identifying correctly basic information (i.e. understanding the nature of websites and finding contact telephone numbers from their web-pages) are consistently en- hanced to varying degrees (up to nearly 20%) by translating online content into a familiar language. In addition, confidence ratings given by users to the reliability and accuracy of the information they find are significantly higher (with increases be- tween 5 and 11%) when they translate websites into their preferred language with free online MT services. 1 Introduction 1.1 Background and Rationale Online machine translation (MT) technology is today a well-established resource that is available to help overcome a variety of barriers in Internet- based communication. Zervaki (2002), for in- stance, presents a number of examples focusing on the output produced by four leading free online MT services, examining the reasons for some of their linguistic weaknesses. Yang and Lange (2003) provide an in-depth account of the usage of Babelfish, the pioneer free Internet-based MT sys- tem, whilst Smith (2003) describes the setup and applications of the online machine translation facil- ity powered by Systran made available by Pricewa- terhouseCoopers to its international employees through the firm’s Intranet, reporting on company- wide user statistics and feedback. Outside the corporate and commercial arena, Somers et al. (2006) apply a number of techniques borrowed from the fields of computational stylometry, plagiarism detection, text reuse and MT evaluation with a pedagogical perspective: they propose a range of methods and experiments to investigate how to detect the inappropriate use of free web-based MT tools by language students who take unfair advantage of such resources for their translation homework and assignments, fo- cusing on English as the source language in com- bination with Spanish, Italian and German. Gaspari (2004a) discusses a number of design-related is- sues with an impact on the effective integration of a free online MT facility into the home pages of monolingual websites in English for the purpose of disseminating their contents in multiple languages, and Gaspari (2005) describes the technical details of the implementation of this MT-based approach to the translation of online text for a complex and highly dynamic website, providing data related to user testing and evaluation based on 72 multilin- gual evaluators comparing 4 design prototypes. 46 Proceedings …

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