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
References
Allen, Jeffrey
2003 “Post-editing.” In Computers and Translation: A Translator’s Guide, ed. by Harold Somers, 297–317. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 
Brown, M. Katherine
2003 “Trends in Writing for Translation.” MultiLingual Computing & Technology: Supplement on Writing for Translation 591 (October/November): 4–8.
Caidi, Nadia, and Danielle Allard
2005 “Social Inclusion of Newcomers to Canada: An Information Problem?” Library and Information Science Research 27 (3): 302–324.
Chesterman, Andrew, and Emma Wagner
2002 Can Theory Help Translators? A Dialogue Between the Ivory Tower and the Wordface. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Church, Kenneth W., and Eduard H. Hovy
1993 “Good Applications for Crummy Machine Translation.” Machine Translation 8 (4): 239–258.
City of Ottawa
http://ottawa.ca. Last accessed 22 February 2014.
Costa-Jussà, Marta R., Mireia Farrús, José B. Mariño, and José A.R. Fonollosa
2012 “Study and Comparison of Rule-Based and Statistical Catalan-Spanish Machine Translation Systems.” Computing and Informatics 311: 245–270.
Edwards, John
1992 “Sociopolitical Aspects of Language Maintenance and Loss: Towards a Typology of Minority Language Situations.” In Maintenance and Loss of Minority Languages, ed. by Willem Fase, Koen Jaspaert, and Sjaak Kroon, 37–54. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Frisken, Frances, and Marcia Wallace
2002 The Response of the Municipal Public Service Sector to the Challenge of Immigrant Settlement (Revised Edition). Citizenship and Immigration Canada. http://www.settlement.org/downloads/municipal_sector.pdf. Last accessed 24 March 2014.
Garcia, Ignacio
2011 “Translating by Post-editing: Is it the Way Forward?” Machine Translation 25 (3): 217–237.
Gauthier, François
2012 2012 Survey on Rates and Income. Translated by Karin Montin. Quebec, Canada: Ordre des traducteurs, terminologues et interprètes agréés du Québec.
George, Usha
2002 “A Needs-based Model for Settlement Service Delivery for Newcomers to Canada.” International Social Work 45 (4): 465–480.
Guerberof Arenas, Ana
2009 “Productivity and Quality in the Post-editing of Outputs from Translation Memories and Machine Translation.” Localisation Focus 7 (1): 11–21.
Holt, Glen E
(ed) 2009 “Library Services for Immigrants, an Abridged Version.” Public Library Quarterly 28 (2): 120–126.
Horowitz, Carol R., Mimsie Robinson, and Sarena Seifer
2009 “Community-based Participatory Research From the Margin to the Mainstream: Are Researchers Prepared?” Circulation 1191: 2633–2642.
International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)
2013 Riding the Waves or Caught in the Tide? Navigating the Evolving Information Environment. Insights from the IFLA Trend Report. The Hague: IFLA.
King, Margaret
1997 “Evaluating Translation.” In Machine Translation and Translation Theory, ed. by Christina Hauenschild and Susanne Heizmann, 251–264. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.
Koehn, Philipp, and Barry Haddow
2009 “Interactive Assistance to Human Translators using Statistical Machine Translation Methods.” In
Proceedings of MT Summit XII
, Ottawa, Canada (26–30 August 2009). http://www.mt-archive.info/MTS-2009-TOC.htm. Last accessed 25 November 2014.
Kohl, John. R
2008 The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market. Cary, NC: SAS Institute, Inc.
Lehrberger, John, and Laurent Bourbeau
1988 Machine Translation: Linguistic Characteristics of MT Systems and General Methodology of Evaluation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Library Settlement Partnerships (LSP) Program
http://www.lsp-peb.ca/. Last accessed 22 February 2014.
Loffler-Laurian, Anne-Marie
1996 La traduction automatique. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion.
MacDonald, Susan
2012 “Conceptualizing Public Library Service to Newcomers in Canada.” In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science, ed. by Anabel Quan-Haase, Victoria L. Rubin, and Debbie Chaves. http://www.cais-acsi.ca/proceedings/2012/caisacsi2012_60_macdonald.pdf. Last accessed 2 March 2014.
Minkler, Meredith, and Nina Wallerstein
(eds) 2008 Community-Based Participatory Research for Health: From Process to Outcomes (Second edition). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Ó Broin, Ultan
2009 “Controlled Authoring to Improve Localization.” MultiLingual: Getting Started Guide on Writing for Translation (October/November): 12–14.
O’Brien, Sharon
2003 “Controlling Controlled English: An Analysis of Several Controlled Language Rule Sets.” In
Proceedings of the Joint Conference combining the 8th International Workshop of the European Association for Machine Translation and the 4th Controlled Language Applications Workshop (Dublin, 15–17 May 2003)
. http://www.mt-archive.info/CLT-2003-Obrien.pdf. Last accessed 28 November 2014.
Ottawa Public Library (Newcomers)
Papineni, Kishore, Salim Roukos, Todd Ward, and Wei-Jing Zhu
2002 “BLEU: A Method for Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation.” In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, 311–318. Stroudsberg, PA. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P02-1040.pdf. Last accessed 28 August 2015.
Polvsen, Claus, Nancy Underwood, Bradley Music, and Anne Neville
1998 “Evaluating Text-type Suitability for Machine Translation a Case Study on an English-Danish MT System.” In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Vol. 11, ed. by Antonio Rubio, Natividad Gallardo, Rosa Castro, and Antonio Tejada, 27–31. Paris: European Language Resources Association.
Sichel, Barb
2009 “Planning and Writing for Translation.” MultiLingual: Getting Started Guide on Writing for Translation (October/November): 3–4.
Simard, Michel, and Pierre Isabelle
2009 “Phrase-based Machine Translation in a Computer-assisted Translation Environment.” In
Proceedings of MT Summit XII
, Ottawa, Canada (26–30 August 2009). http://www.mt-archive.info/MTS-2009-TOC.htm [Retrieved November 25 2014].
Statistics Canada
2011 2011 Census of Canada. http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/index-eng.cfm. Last accessed 20 February 2014.
Thurmair, Gregor
2004 “Comparing Rule-based and Statistical MT Output.” In
Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) 2014 Workshop on the Amazing Utility of Parallel and Comparable Corpora
. http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2004/. Last accessed 25 November 2014.
Translation Automation User Society (TAUS)
“Post-editing Guidelines.” https://evaluation.taus.net/resources/guidelines/post-editing/machine-translation-post-editing-guidelines. Last accessed 2 March 2014.
Trujillo, Arturo
1999 Translation Engines: Techniques for Machine Translation. London: Springer.
White, John S
2003 “How to Evaluate Machine Translation.” In Computers and Translation: A Translator’s Guide, ed.by Harold Somers, 211–244. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Willison, Kevin D
2013 “Maximizing Chronic Disease Prevention and Management through Community Based Participatory Research and Inter-collaborative Practices.” Open Journal of Social Science Research 1 (1): 7–14.
Cited by
Cited by 10 other publications
No author info given
2017.
In Crowdsourcing and Online Collaborative Translations [Benjamins Translation Library, 131],
No author info given
2019.
In Machine Translation and Global Research: Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community,
► pp. 97 ff.
Abdel Latif, Muhammad M. M.
2020.
In Translator and Interpreter Education Research [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ],
► pp. 61 ff.
Asscher, Omri & Ella Glikson
2021. Human evaluations of machine translation in an ethically charged situation.
New Media & Society ► pp. 146144482110188 ff.
Bowker, Lynne & Tom Delsey
2016.
In Border Crossings [Benjamins Translation Library, 126],
► pp. 73 ff.
Daems, Joke, Sonia Vandepitte, Robert J. Hartsuiker & Lieve Macken
2017. Translation Methods and Experience: A Comparative Analysis of Human Translation and Post-editing with Students and Professional Translators.
Meta 62:2 ► pp. 245 ff.
Mossop, Brian
2019. Lynne Bowker and Jairo Buitrago Ciro. Machine Translation and Global Research: Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community. Bingley, Emerald Publishing, 2019, 111 p. .
TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction 32:2 ► pp. 250 ff.
Nurminen, Mary & Maarit Koponen
2020. Machine translation and fair access to information.
Translation Spaces 9:1 ► pp. 150 ff.
Yang, Yanxia & Xiangling Wang
2019. Modeling the intention to use machine translation for student translators: An extension of Technology Acceptance Model.
Computers & Education 133 ► pp. 116 ff.
Yang, Yanxia, Xiangling Wang & Qingqing Yuan
2021. Measuring the usability of machine translation in the classroom context.
Translation and Interpreting Studies 16:1 ► pp. 101 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 november 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.