[Verification] What is the actual quality of machine translation?

"How much quality translation can be achieved with machine translation?"
This is one of the common questions we receive from customers considering machine translation.
Even if machine translation can reduce costs, if the quality is not usable, it doesn't make sense, right?

Therefore, this time we will introduce the quality evaluation results of machine translation from a sample project that our company actually conducted.

Overview of Sample Project

• Period: October 2013
• Translation Target: User Manuals for Office Equipment
• Translation languages: English to French, Italian, German, Spanish
• Engine used: Moses (commercial statistical-based engine from overseas)
• Corpus loaded into the statistics-based engine: Approximately 500,000 words

*Using past translation memories from the same series

Translation Evaluation Criteria

First, we trained the statistics-based engine with approximately 500,000 words of past translation memory for the target translations and the same product group.
Training involves loading past translation data into the engine to teach it grammar rules and terminology.
Then, using the trained engine, we randomly extracted 300 sentences from the results of the machine translation and had them evaluated by two native translators for each language.

Here is the graph summarizing the results.

The blue part of the graph represents the proportion of texts classified as "Excellent/Good",
while the gray part represents the proportion of texts classified as "Medium/Poor".

How about that? You can see that the blue part occupies a large proportion in all languages,
and I think you can understand that the quality is quite good.

The text in the blue section is of a quality that can be used as is from machine translation results,
or with minimal corrections,
which means that translation can be done more efficiently than having a translator translate everything from scratch.

By selecting the appropriate engine for the project and
establishing the workflow,
it is possible to achieve high quality even with machine translation.

Please feel free to contact us.