Investigating the usefulness of machine translation for newcomers at the public library
This study investigates the potential of machine translation as an efficient and cost-effective means to translate sections of the Ottawa Public Library website into Spanish to better meet the linguistic needs of the Spanish-speaking newcomer community. One-hundred and fourteen community members participated in a recipient evaluation survey, in which they evaluated four different versions of a translated portion of the library’s website — a professional human translation, a maximally post-edited machine translation, a rapidly post-edited machine translation, and a raw machine translation. Participants also considered metadata such as the time and cost required to produce each version. Findings show that while machine translation cannot address every need, there are some instances for which the faster and cheaper post-edited versions are considered useful and acceptable to the community.
Keywords: immigrant languages, recipient evaluation, public library, machine translation, post-editing
Published online: 21 January 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.10.2.01bow
https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.10.2.01bow
Cited by
Cited by 9 other publications
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