An evaluation of the usefulness of machine translations produced at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, with a summary of the translation methods

evaluation of the usefglness of machine translations nroduce~ at the National Physical Lab.oratory. Tea diD~ton, with a summary of the translation method. ~ ~ ~./~ l / Introdnction / The machine translation project at the National Physical Laboratory (NFL) has b?en terminated. It has always ha~ as its prime aim a demonstrat~n of the practicability of translation by computer of Russian scientific texts into En@lish. In order to test how far this aim has been fulfilled and further, to provide evidence to 6~i~e a potential agency intereste~ in givin~ a machine translation service, we he.carried out an evaluation experiment on our translations, the conditions of which as far as possible emulated those of a translations service. The results of this experiment are presented in this paper, together with a statuary of the translation methods used. The paper as a whole will thus give an independent presentation of "what methods produced what results". For a comprehensive account of the NFL translation techniques, see reference I. Evaluation of Translations We have been concerned with the translation of scientific Russian texts only. In considering how we might evaluate the results of our work, the context of use of scientific translations imposed two main constraints. Thus, firstly, in the vast m~jority of cases we woul~ expect readers of translations to be themselves experts in the subject matter of the material translated, i.e. they would be reading the translations because these reflect their main professional responsibilities. We may then expect that the inherent background knowledge of such readers will ensure a hiKh impetus to their comprehension of translations and help them through syntactic awkwardnesses and multiple-meshing choices. We would also expect that only a small peroenta6e of these readers would have any competence in Russian. Secondly, the items of translation being read by the above typical readers will normally be whole infor.~tion units (journal article, chapter of book, abstract, review, &c.), and they will have the freedom to ignore unimportant sections of such units an& to use sentence or paragraph context (or even remoter references) to help elucidate obscure sections. More specifically, a particular sentence may be poorly translate~, but because the reader can see that this is not an important sentence or because the context of (hopefUlly, better-translated) neighbourin6 sentences clarifies its meaning, that sentence may not affect at all an adequate comprehension of the whole.