What ’ s the bottom line ? Development of and potential uses for the Summary Translation Evaluation Tool ( STET )

anguage analysts in the intelligence community (IC) confront huge amounts of foreign language material, some highly relevant to national security requirements and some of lesser value. Language analysts cannot provide full translations of everything they process, nor do other analysts have the time or need to read full translations. Summary translation enables language analysts to identify, distill, and present English translations of the important information contained in the original foreign language material, thereby efficiently communicating the most crucial information. The term summary translation can be used to cover a broad range of tasks that vary in their purposes and skill demands, from documenting essential elements of information contained in a single source item to writing a personality profile or situation assessment synthesizing information from many source items (Michael, Bailey, Gannon-Kurowski, & Pinckney, 2007). Despite this variability, a common attribute of summary translations produced within the IC context is that they are typically targeted summaries written in response to intelligence needs, i.e., customer-specified requirements or requests for information. In other words, writers may be looking for information about specific topics or answers to specific questions, rather than attempting to summarize all of the main points of the source item as they would in a generic summary. The Summary Translation Evaluation Tool (STET) was created primarily for assessment of targeted summaries, which are uncommon in commercial and academic environments and therefore rarely studied and ill-understood. The STET was designed not only to help researchers develop a deeper understanding of targeted summary translation, but also to establish a standard for summary translations and to provide language analysts with a vital tool for both assessing and improving summary translation performance via standardized quality control (QC) and enhanced training.