History: Monolingual contributors

Contributions of Monolinguals to Translation Crowdsourcing, Moderator Yakov Kronrod

How are monolinguals used?

At the University of Maryland, the MonoTrans and ParaTrans systems use monolinguals on either side of an MT system. Error spans are flagged by TL monolinguals in the translated text. These error spans are mapped back to the corresponding passages in the source text. The problematic passages are rephrased by SL monolinguals, and then they are retranslated by the MT system. This process is repeated until the TL monolingual is satisfied with the translation.

A MITRE English-Korean chat translator ended up using a similar approach. If a message translation was not comprehended by the fellow on the other end, he could ask the originator to rephrase. In this fashion, effective dialog across language boundaries was achieved.

At Symantec, text is sent through a hybrid translation memory + machine translation system. Bilingual post-editors are responsible for improving the translation while maintaining fidelity to the original. They are considering but have not yet experimented with using TL monolinguals for post-editing, but they are considering it for some user-generated content.

What can TL monolinguals do if they can’t understand the translation?

The basic idea of retranslating paraphrases can be done without the involvement of a SL assistant. The problem passages can be translated into another language and back. These back translations can be considered paraphrases of the original problematic passage. These are translated into the original TL for the consideration of the TL monolingual to help make sense of the original translation.

How do you evaluate the quality of the MT?

Traditional MT researcher measures include BLEU, TER, TERp, and METEOR. Task-based analysis—evaluating how well end users were able to use or understand the material—is an alternative that more accurately measures the ultimate goal.

How can SL monolinguals help?

First, they can use tools like acrolinx to enforce style rules and convert variant SL sentences into the standardized form, thus increasing leveraging in the source document and in translation. Second, a skilled editor can head off problems that will cause problems in translation, such as inconsistent terminology, awkward phrasing, and generally poor writing.