Comments on: What’s the best free machine translation engine? http://www.globalbydesign.com/blog/2010/02/21/best-free-translation-engine/ Adventures in Web Globalization Fri, 03 Sep 2010 03:15:58 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Is Google the best machine translation engine? It depends… | Global by Design http://www.globalbydesign.com/blog/2010/02/21/best-free-translation-engine/comment-page-1/#comment-39390 Is Google the best machine translation engine? It depends… | Global by Design Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:12:29 +0000 http://www.globalbydesign.com/?p=2786#comment-39390 [...] weeks ago, I introduced Ethan Shen and his project to analyze the three major free machine translation (MT) engines — Google, Microsoft, and [...] [...] weeks ago, I introduced Ethan Shen and his project to analyze the three major free machine translation (MT) engines — Google, Microsoft, and [...]

]]> By: Mike Unwalla @ TechScribe http://www.globalbydesign.com/blog/2010/02/21/best-free-translation-engine/comment-page-1/#comment-38484 Mike Unwalla @ TechScribe Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:04:06 +0000 http://www.globalbydesign.com/?p=2786#comment-38484 @John: Which is why translators are best positioned to judge the quality of machine translation engines. @John: But which engine offers the highest quality translations? I’m assuming Google, but this is only based on anecdotal feedback and personal experience. For an evaluation of the quality of machine translation from Google, see http://www.international-english.co.uk/mt-evaluation.html. English to Spanish and English to Norwegian give satisfactory translations. English to Welsh is very low quality. @John: And although even translators are going to disagree as well, if you get enough of them together, perhaps you can begin to draw statistically significant conclusions. Yes, we had the problem that the translators disagreed with their evaluations of some sentences. For example, if an English term is in the translation, some translators gave a low rating to the sentence and other translators did not necessarily give a low rating. We did not want to give the translators too many guidelines for their evaluation, because we wanted the translators to use their judgement. However, we needed to give some guidelines. @John: Which is why translators are best positioned to judge the quality of machine translation engines.
@John: But which engine offers the highest quality translations? I’m assuming Google, but this is only based on anecdotal feedback and personal experience.

For an evaluation of the quality of machine translation from Google, see http://www.international-english.co.uk/mt-evaluation.html. English to Spanish and English to Norwegian give satisfactory translations. English to Welsh is very low quality.

@John: And although even translators are going to disagree as well, if you get enough of them together, perhaps you can begin to draw statistically significant conclusions.

Yes, we had the problem that the translators disagreed with their evaluations of some sentences. For example, if an English term is in the translation, some translators gave a low rating to the sentence and other translators did not necessarily give a low rating. We did not want to give the translators too many guidelines for their evaluation, because we wanted the translators to use their judgement. However, we needed to give some guidelines.

]]>