Quality as the sum of its parts: A two-step approach for the identification of translation problems and translation quality assessment for HT and MT+PE

Existing translation quality assessment (TQA) metrics have a few major drawbacks: they are often subjective, their scope is limited to the sentence level, and they do not take the translation situation into account. Though suitable for a general assessment, they lack the granularity needed to compare different methods of translation and their respective translation problems. In an attempt to solve these issues, a two-step TQA-approach is presented, based on the dichotomy between adequacy and acceptability. The proposed categorization allows for easy customization and user-defined error weights, which makes it suitable for different types of translation assessment, analysis and comparison. In the first part of the paper, the approach is explained. In the second part of the paper, the approach is tested in a pilot study designed to compare human translation with post-editing for the translation of general texts (newspaper articles). Inter-annotator results are presented for the translation quality assessment task as well as general findings on the productivity and quality differences between postediting and human translation of student translators.