History: WS08Paper:Assessing Translation Progress

The technique explained in the previous section can indicate if a page requires updates or not. However, this information alone does not provide enough insight on the content to allow readers or potential translators to decide if an action should be taken at this point. A reader may not want to switch to a second or third language for a minor change that may have occurred. A translator may want to wait for more significant changes to be made before updating the content.

To provide this insight, it was necessary to find a measure to qualify the size of the changes. Finding an accurate measure is not an easy task. In natural languages, a single character change can completely change the meaning and complete paragraphs can be meaningless. For this reason, the measure found is bound to be imprecise and can only be used as an estimate.

The screenshots presented in the previous section contains percentages of "Up-to-date-ness". This measure indicates how many segments have been modified in the other linguistic versions. A modified segment is a segment that is either added or removed. The segments are counted as sentences.

To take the difference of effort required to add a segment and to remove one, additions and removals are weighted differently in the calculation.