On Post-Editability of Machine Translated Texts

Abstract

Machine Translated texts are often far from perfect and postediting is essential to get publishable quality. Post-editing may not always be a pleasant task. However, modern machine translation (MT) approaches like Statistical MT (SMT) and Neural MT (NMT) seem to hold greater promise. In this work, we present a quantitative method for scoring translations and computing the post-editability of MT system outputs.We show that the scores we get correlate well with MT evaluation metrics as also with the actual time and effort required for post-editing. We compare the outputs of three modern MT systems namely phrase-based SMT (PBMT), NMT, and Google translate for their Post-Editability for English to Hindi translation. Further, we explore the effect of various kinds of errors in MT outputs on postediting time and effort. Including an Indian language in this kind of post-editability study and analyzing the influence oferrors on postediting time and effort for NMT are highlights of this work.