[Engine] How to choose the best machine translation engine

When introducing machine translation, the first step is to select a machine translation engine.
If this selection is wrong, even if you spend money to introduce it,
the end result may be a sad one where the output is not useful.

There are over 40 different machine translation engines in the market.
With so many options, how do you choose the best engine?
We will share some tips on that.

When choosing a machine translation engine, first consider

• Engine Types (Rule-based / Statistical-based / Hybrid)
• Implementation cost, operating cost
• Integration with translation support tools such as Trados (CAT tools)
• Supported File Formats
• Support System
• Usability

It is necessary to confirm points such as this.

And most importantly, the translation quality of the machine translation engine is crucial.
The quality varies greatly depending on the engine.

Let's take a look at the results of comparing the quality of three engines in German for reference.

The blue part of the graph represents "good quality (Excellent/Good)" and the percentage of the text,
while the gray part represents "poor quality (Medium/Poor)" and the percentage of the text.

For more information on the quality evaluation criteria for machine translation, please see here.

In Engine B, nearly half of the sentences were "poor quality",
while in Engine C, most of the sentences became "good quality".

When translating the same sentence like this, the quality can vary greatly depending on the machine translation engine used.
Therefore, it is recommended to perform sample translations with multiple engines beforehand and compare the quality before making a decision.

At Human Science, we also provide consulting services for selecting machine translation engines.

We will evaluate the quality of 3-5 candidate engines from multiple engines,
calculate cost reduction rate, translation period reduction rate, investment recovery rate, etc. after introduction,
and propose the best engine.
Please feel free to contact us.

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If the form is not available, please send your inquiry via email to hsweb_inquiry@science.co.jp.

Alternatively, please feel free to contact us at TEL: 03-5321-3111 or by phone.

 

Blog Writing Team

Tokuda Ai

・As a machine translation consultant, I provide consulting services for Japanese companies on machine translation implementation and process building.
・I place importance on the quality of the source text, which affects multilingual translation, and also provide consulting services for manual creation suitable for machine translation in the Japanese writing process.
・I also give presentations on the following topics related to machine translation.
- Presentation at the 23rd JTF (Japan Translation Federation) Translation Festival in 2013
"Approaches to Machine Translation in Multilingual Environments
- From the Perspectives of Evaluation and Process"
- Presentation at the 2014 AAMT (Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation) Machine Translation Fair
"Mastering Machine Translation - Improving Quality and Productivity"