Translatability checker: a tool to help decide whether to use MT

Translatability Checker: A Tool to Help Decide Whether to Use MT Nancy L. Underwood, Bart Jongejan Center for Sprogteknologi Njalsgade 80, DK-2300 Copenhagen S Denmark nancy@cst.ku.dk, bart@cst.ku.dk Abstract This paper describes a tool designed to assess the machine translatability of English source texts by assigning a translatability index to both individual sentences and the text as a whole. The tool is designed to be both stand-alone and integratable into a suite of other tools which together help to improve the quality of professional translation in the preparatory phase of the translation workflow. Assessing translatability is an important element in ensuring the most efficient and cost effective use of current translation technology, and the tool must be able to quickly determine the translatability of a text without itself using too many resources. It is therefore based on rather simple tagging and pattern matching technologies which bring with them a certain level of indeterminacy. This potential disadvantage can, however, be offset by the fact that an annotated version of the text is simultaneously produced to allow the user to interpret the results of the checker. Keywords Translatability, MT Introduction Although the use of MT in busy translation departments and agencies can lead to significant benefits in terms of improved productivity, increased profits and worker satisfaction (see e.g. Bech, 1997), machine translation quality can be, to say the least, variable and dependent upon both the text to be translated and the MT system used. Using an MT system to translate certain texts can result in such bad translations that it becomes more time- consuming and costly to post-edit the raw output than to translate the text by more conventional means. So, in order to avoid such wastage it is important for a translation manager to be able to identify those texts which are most suitable for MT. This paper presents a tool designed to assess the machine- translatability of English source texts which has been developed under the auspices of the TQPro (Translation Quality for Professionals) project1 (Thurmair, 2000). The current version of the tool is stand-alone, and called from the command line, however it is designed ultimately also to be integrated into the overall TQPro architecture as part of a suite of preparatory tools in the translation workflow. Thus the intention behind the Translatability Checker is not to invoke the full machinery of an MT system (such as its parser, and lexicon or terminology look-up) but rather to carry out a rapid and somewhat shallow analysis of the source text. As will be seen this approach involves a constant trade-off between speed and robustness on the one hand and accuracy on the other. Such a trade-off, though, is mitigated by the fact that the tool outputs not only a numeric score for the translatability of the text, the "Translatability Index" (TI), but also an annotated version 1 The project is supported by the European Commission in the Fifth Framework Programme. of the text displaying the analysis of each sentence to enable the …

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