Round-trip Translation: What Is It Good For?
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper considers the popular but questionable technique of ‘round-trip translation’ (RTT) as a means of evaluating free on-line Machine Translation systems. Two experiments are reported, both relating to common requirements of lay-users of MT on the web. In the first we see whether RTT can accurately predict the overall quality of the MT system. In the second, we ask whether RTT can predict the translatability of a given text. In both cases, we find RTT to be a poor predictor of quality, with high BLEU and F-scores for RTTs when the forward translation was poor. We discuss why this is the case, and conclude that, even if it seemed obvious that RTT was good for nothing, at least we now have some tangible evidence.
منابع مشابه
Unsupervised Measurement of Translation Quality Using Multi-engine, Bi-directional Translation
Lay people discussing machine translation systems often perform a round trip translation, that is translating a text into a foreign language and back, to measure the quality of the system. The idea behind this is that a good system will produce a round trip translation that is exactly (or perhaps very close to) the original text. However, people working with machine translation systems intuitiv...
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