Machine Translation and the Evaluation of Its Quality

Machine translation has already become part of our everyday life. This chapter gives an overview of machine translation approaches. Statistical machine translation was a dominant approach over the past 20 years. It brought many cases of practical use. It is described in more detail in this chapter. Statistical machine translation is not equally successful for all language pairs. Highly inflectional languages are hard to process, especially as target languages. As statistical machine translation has almost reached the limits of its capacity, neural machine translation is becoming the technology of the future. This chapter also describes the evaluation of machine translation quality. It covers manual and automatic evaluations. Traditional and recently proposed metrics for automatic machine translation evaluation are described. Human translation still provides the best translation quality, but it is, in general, time-consuming and expensive. Integration of human and machine translation is a promising workflow for the future. Machine translation will not replace human translation, but it can serve as a tool to increase productivity in the translation process.