Objective evaluation of second language learner2s translation proficiency using statistical translation measures

For objective evaluation of the second language learner’s translation proficiency, we tested two measures commonly used in statistical machine translation. One is word n-gram probability of a target language to measure likelihood of translated sentences as a target language. The other one is translation probabilities from source language sentences to target language sentences to measure translation accuracies between these sentences. The subjective proficiency scores of Japanese learners were compared with these objective measures extracted from English sentences translated by them. Statistical analysis showed no correlation of word n-gram probabilities but high correlation of translation probabilities which suggests the usefulness for objective evaluation of learner’s translation proficiency.