A Case Study of German into English by Machine Translation: to Evaluate MOSES using MOSES for Mere Mortals

This paper evaluates the usefulness of Moses, an open source statistical machine translation (SMT) engine, for professional translators and post editors. It takes a look behind the scenes at the workings of Moses and reports on experiments to investigate how translators can contribute to advances in the use of SMT as a tool. In particular the difference in quality of output was compared as the amount of training data was increased using four SMT engines. This small study works with the German-English language pair to investigate the difficulty of building a personal SMT engine on a PC with no connection to the Internet to overcome the problems of confidentiality and security that prevent the use of online tools. The paper reports on the ease of installing Moses on an Ubuntu PC using Moses for Mere Mortals. Translations were compared using the Bleu metric and human evaluation.