Presented at TAUS QE Summit Dublin, May 2015

Topic 3: Ephemeral Translations

Dynamic Quality Revisited: Stakeholders, Challenges, Best Practices

Olga BeregovayaLena Marg

An extra terrestrial’s breakthrough.

Ephemeral but Here to Stay

ONCE : “future of the translation industry”

NOW: our day-to-day reality

• Wide range of translation scenarios• Evolving quality requirements – from “transcreation –perfect” to

“just actionable” • Multiple delivery channels• Retiring the content almost instantly

“Common sense" or “Style Guides” or both? The age of "new creativity"? When do we post-edit?What does the workforce look like? 

Story 1: Lightest PE Possible

Details• Use MT but the content needs to be curated by a human to remove

the most prominent MT errors• Delivering online content is the client‘s business• Service, travel and hospitality domain - broad• User-generated content, huge volumes

Translation objective: post-edit raw MT enough to remove the most obvious MT errors and increase fluency

Key Challenges Defining post-editing requirements Achieving the highest productivity possible by avoiding over-editing Making the content appear “human“ at minimal cost

Story 2: Real-time Content Delivery

Details• Cheap realtime translation • > 30 languages, including rare language pairs• Technical domain• Professionally authored content

Translation objective: gisting quality MT; identify main areas of traffic for future investment; obtain in-domain data to fine tune systems

Key Challenges Range of languages and sparsity of training data for many of the

languages Post-editing for MT engine fine-tuning – training data volume requirements Measuring the content impact and success Engaging community?

Story 3: PE for Machine Consumption

Details• Gisting quality raw MT + post-editing of MT for SMT corpus building• All main language groups• Extremely wide range of consumer goods • User-generated; cryptic / abbreviated; elements of SEO

Translation objective: post-editing to build good quality in-domain corpus for improving SMT corpus > improve raw MT output

Key Challenges Identifying the right translation resources – professional or just internet-

savvy Define post-editing requirements – style guide or common sense, or both? Achieving the desired productivity gains

Story 4: Raw or Light PE for Sales Enablement?

Details• Gist translation of bid-related documentation• Into-English translation direction• Big volume legal/business documentation• Well-authored but contains complex “legalese“ clauses

Translation objective: provide gist translation of critical legal documentation to win a bid

Key Challenges Selecting the best translation process / resources

Story 5: Actionable MT Output

Details• Real-time communication support• English Germanic and Romance translation directions• Content authored by field users and support personnel

Translation objective: provide cross-language real time support to European distributors

Key Challenges Achieving the balance between Adequacy and Fluency when

introducing training data Delivering usable and actionable instructions Overcoming SMT shortcomings when handling negative/positive

statements Educating „the casual evaluator“ and getting their acceptance

FindingsTRANSLATION WORKFLOW

Technical setup often very simple, but tailored to the request

Initial request may be for raw MT, PE requirement becomes necessary later

TRANSLATION SUPPLY CHAINNeed for flat hierarchies, direct interaction, not suitable for all structures /

professional translation providersSelection through motivation for unconventional translation methods

Shift focus to content and purpose, away from ‘consistency with legacy translations, style guides & unvalidated glossaries‘ type setups

QUALITY EVALUATIONLess needed to PASS / FAIL a final translation, but crucial for aligning expectations, defining MT engine retraining needs, establishing PE

requirements

Breakout Session

Workflows / technology

Aligning expectations: methods, timing (room for learning curve?)

Translation resources: motivation, payment, recruitment

…

Thank You!