Evaluation of Machine Translation in English-Chinese Automatic Subtitling of TED Talks

Abstract

With technology becoming an essential competitive factor for subtitle translation services, the quality of machine subtitle translation in the current era deserves further examination. This paper examines the Chinese translation of 20 Ted Talks subtitled by an automatic subtitling software under the frame of the FAR model. This paper examines if machine subtitle translation has semantic, contextual, grammatical or spelling errors, idiomatic errors, syncopation and inappropriate synchronization, as well as wrong reading speed and paragraph length. It also emphasizes the need to broaden new perspectives on the quality of machine subtitle translation.