Human Science has released a new product specialized in supporting post-editing work in Trados, called "MTrans Post-Edit Booster".
This time, we will introduce in detail the development background. If you are dissatisfied with post-editing work for machine translation, this is a must-see.
1. Background of MTrans Post-Edit Booster development
Since the emergence of next-generation translation technology Neural Machine Translation (NMT) in 2016, machine translation has been adopted by many companies.
In the past, all documents were translated from scratch, but recently many companies have been utilizing machine translation.
NMT has become a very reliable ally for those involved in translation, as its accuracy is much higher compared to previous machine translation technologies.
However, even though the accuracy of machine translation has improved, there are still points to consider.
For example, even if there are some errors in documents circulated within the company, it will not be a major problem. However, when it comes to translating proposals, quotes, and manuals attached to products for customers, there must be no mistakes in the translation.
Depending on the purpose of the translation, it may be necessary to correct machine translation. This process of correcting machine translation is called post-edit.
2. Purpose of Post-editing Machine Translation
The purpose of post-editing has two main elements.
1. Find and correct mistranslations caused by machine translation
2. Refine and polish machine-translated text to make it sound like it was translated by a human from the beginning
If you are translating documents for external parties such as customers, "Step 1" is essential. Even minor errors can lead to mistrust towards the company and damage to the brand image. Be sure to confirm that there are no mistranslations.
In addition, if you want to make advertisements or presentation materials more attractive, or if you want to make product manuals or data sheets easier to understand, you will need to adjust and brush up the translation in "2".
Here, "translation adjustment" refers to
● Standardization of symbols in half-width and full-width
● Remove unnecessary spaces
● Standardization of notation
Refers to superficial modifications such as etc.
On the other hand, "brushing up the translation" is
● Finish the text to attract readers (such as advertisements and presentation materials)
● Create easy-to-understand documents (such as manuals and datasheets)
This refers to modifying sentences according to the purpose of the content or materials, such as etc.
3. Pitfalls of the Latest Machine Translation: Inconsistency in Translation
Recent machine translation systems have greatly improved translation accuracy, but there are still areas where they struggle. One of those areas is "inconsistent translation."
For example, there may be a mixture of full-width slashes (／) and half-width slashes (/) within a single document. This can also occur with colons (：), exclamation marks (！), question marks (？), and other symbols.
In addition, machine translation systems cannot unify the notation of long vowels, such as "user" and "server", as well as "ユーザー" and "ユーザ" or "サーバー" and "サーバ".
Some companies also provide a style guide that defines these formatting rules for translation.
In the case of such companies, it is necessary to correct the inconsistency of symbols and long vowel notation in accordance with the style guide during post-editing.
4. Post-editors' stress
When performing post-editing for advertisements and manuals, post-editors should focus more on "brushing up" the translated text rather than "adjusting" it. This is because using machine-translated text as is does not produce the naturalness of human translation.
However, due to the inconsistent expressions often found in machine-translated texts, it takes a considerable amount of time to correct them.
According to a survey conducted by Human Science, it was revealed that it takes approximately 30 minutes for post-editors to perform "translation adjustments" when working 8 hours a day on post-editing. Post-editors spend a considerable amount of time unifying characters such as "/" and "user".
In addition, we conducted a survey on post-editing, and among the responses were
● There are many tasks related to standardization, and there is not enough time to brush up on the translation.
● Is it okay for the machine to automatically correct inconsistent notation?
There were opinions such as this.
5. Leave it to MTrans Post-Edit Booster for things that can be mechanically corrected!
"MTrans Post-Edit Booster" was developed to address the issues of machine translation quirks and post-editing concerns.
With MTrans Post-Edit Booster, you can define "search for common incorrect spellings in machine translation" and "replace incorrect spellings with corrected versions".
When the post-editor opens a file for post-editing, predefined errors are already corrected by MTrans Post-Edit Booster. Therefore, the post-editor can focus on "brushing up the translation". Also, since there is no mechanical correction work, the post-editor can work smoothly and comfortably.
If you are using Trados and are struggling with post-editing, or if you are considering implementing machine translation, please consider MTrans Post-Edit Booster.
For more information on MTrans Post-Edit Booster, please see here.
Next Blog PostIn our next blog post, we will introduce how to use MTrans Post-Edit Booster when translating from Japanese to English.
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