what do translators want?Investigating translators’ requirements for translationtechnologies

Anna ZaretskayaMay 6, 2016

Rome, Italy

Goals

Usersurvey

Translators’needs

Exis,ngtools

Evalua,on Improvements

1

Survey content

CAT tools - usage- best and worst features

Machine Translation - usage- integration in CAT- languages and domains

Corpora - using- compiling- special tools

Terminology - management- extraction

2

What is new?

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

TM MT TerminologyManagement

Corpora Corporaprocessing

MeLLANGE2006 TM2006 SDL2009 TTC2010 TranslaEonTechnologies2010 AZ2014

3

Features of CAT tools

-Sentencealignment-Automa0chandlingoftags

-Real-0mepreview-EditTM-Autopropaga0on

-OCR-Speechrecogni0on

“Justmakeitsimple”

4

Machine Translation

∙ 36% of MT users∙ 74% find good MT useful

∙ 1/3 of respondents did notknow if they had MT in theirCAT tool

∙ one of the least usefulfeatures in CAT

5

Post-editing of MT

Can PE be a way to improve the MT experience for a professionaltranslator?

MT errors in post-editing

1. take into account when evaluating MT output2. automatically post-edit certain errors3. highlight most difficult errors

6

Corpora

- 15% of corpora users

- compiling corpora is time consuming (57%); not familiar with anyspecial tools (34%)

but:

concordance search is favourite feature

∙ make it easy to incorporate more resources in concordance search(not only TM)

∙ parallel and comparable corpora

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Terminology

Appears both in the favourite and most-hated features =>

terminology management is necessary, but the current tools are notgood enough.

- Study different steps in the terminology management process tomake it easier

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Bibliography

Costa, H., Corpas-Pastor, G., Seghiri, M., and Zaretskaya, A. (2016). Nine terminology extraction tools - Are they useful for translators?Multilingual.

Zaretskaya, A. (2016). A quantitative method for evaluation of cat tools based on user preferences. In Proceedings of the AELFE XVInternational Conference. University of Alcalá.

Zaretskaya, A., Corpas Pastor, G., and Seghiri, M. (2015a). Translators’ requirements for translation technologies: a user survey. InCorpas-Pastor, G., Seghiri-Domínguez, M., Gutiérrez-Florido, R., and na, M. U.-M., editors, Nuevos horizontes en los Estudios deTraducción e Interpretación (Trabajos completos) / New Horizons in Translation and Interpreting Studies (Full papers) / Novoshorizontes dos Estudos da Tradução e Interpretação (Comunicações completas), pages 247–254, Malaga, Spain. AIETI, Tradulex.

Zaretskaya, A., Corpas-Pastor, G., and Seghiri, M. (2016a). Corpora in computer-assisted translation: a users’ view. In Corpas-Pastor, G. andSeghiri, M., editors, Corpus-based Approaches to Translation and Interpreting: from theory to applications. Peter Lang, Frankfurt.

Zaretskaya, A., Corpas-Pastor, G., and Seghiri-Domínguez, M. (2016b). A quality evaluation template for machine translation. TranslationJournal.

Zaretskaya, A., Pastor, G. C., and Seghiri, M. (2015b). Integration of machine translation in CAT tools: State of the art, evaluation and userattitudes. SKASE Journal for Translation and Interpretation, 8(1):76–88.

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Thank you! Questions?

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From the horse’s mouth

Agencies using MT are … only interested in money, not in quality and it is our duty to inform end clients about this greedy attitude.

[CAT tools] should be made simple to operate for a linguist not for an IT specialist

I would like to see more compatibility between systems

Unfortunately, many people think that Google translator, or Babelfish, are viable alternatives to paying a human translator.

Make everything easier and easier by making the usage limitless. Thanks.

I feel there is industry pressure now for more translation work to be done on CAT software so perhaps I am a bit of a dinosaur in myattitude!

CAT or TMs are incomprehensible and un-learnable

TM tools are just stealing knowledge from translators and reducing their earnings. I hate them. Thank you.

This survey teaches me that all those tools exist! I wake up to a new world of possibilities!

It would be useful t have a tool that adapts to my ”style”... not only in its terminology but also in its grammatical twists

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