Characteristics of the translation task

Characteristics of the translation task

Definition

Characteristics of the translation task refers to the information flow intended for the output, from the point of view of the agent (human or otherwise) who receives the translation.

Stakeholders

Developers; research sponsors; commercial investors, buying agents, operational managers, end users.

References

Hovy 1999

Hutchins and Somers 1992

Hutchins 2000

Notes

As was noted by J.C.Sager for Machine Translation systems, "two types of use [are] to be considered: (a) the un-edited output; (b) the edited output. The output may be acceptable for either use or both and the evaluation should determine this. In the case of edited output the cost of revision, editing etc. has to be established and compared with the cost of manual translation. Since the type of use is related to the type of text, these types have to be established and taken into account."

In Toward Finely Differentiated Evaluation Metrics for Machine Translation, Hovy suggests dividing all the possible translation tasks into three main groups. He noted that "in order to make the taxonomization of features useful to people who do not already know much about MT and do not wish to become experts in evaluation, it is important to articulate its layers and choices in terms they can intuitively understand." This part of the present evaluation taxonomy describes three principal types of use in such a way that users can identify the particular type of work they want to have done, while developers can define in strict terms what their MT system can do.