[Know-How] Make Original Text Easy for Machine Translation! Quality Improvement through Pre-editing

It goes without saying that when translating, it is necessary to correctly understand the content of the original text. Of course, the same applies to machine translation.
Especially in the case of machine translation, it is necessary to modify the original text into a form that is easier for the machine to translate, as it cannot understand the context of the surrounding sentences.
The process of rewriting the original text to make it easier for the machine to translate is called "pre-editing."

Pre-editing is particularly effective when translating into multiple languages.
For example, let's consider the case of translating into five languages.
If the machine misunderstands the original text in one place, it can lead to mistranslations in all five languages.
What if we look at this from the opposite perspective?
By simply correcting one part of the original text, it is possible to eliminate the need for corrections in all five translations.

In the case of multilingual translation, if the quality of the original text is poor, the post-editing effort can multiply by the number of languages, making pre-editing very important for cost reduction and quality improvement.

The following is a graph showing the improvement rate of quality through pre-editing in projects previously undertaken by Human Science.
When expanding from English to Japanese and Spanish, we compared the output of machine translation without pre-editing and the output of machine translation with pre-editing. We conducted verification using two types of engines: statistical-based and rule-based, and evaluated the quality of each translation on a four-point scale (Excellent, Good, Medium, Poor).
After pre-editing, it is evident that for both languages and engines, the number of Excellent and Good ratings increased, indicating an improvement in quality.

Consultation, estimates, and proposals regarding pre-editing are free of charge.

Please feel free to contact us.

 

 

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