Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: The late 1990s saw the advent of free online machine translators such as Babelfish, Google Translate and Transtext. Professional opinion regarding the quality of the translations provided by them, oscillates wildly from the «laughably bad» (Ali, 2007) to «a tremendous success» (Yang and Lange, 1998). While the literature on commercial machine translators is vast, there are only a handful of studies, mostly in blog format, that evaluate and rank free online machine translators. This paper offers a review of the most significant contributions in that field with an emphasis on two key issues: (i) the need for a ranking system; (ii) the results of a ranking system devised by the authors of this paper. Our small-scale evaluation of the performance of ten free machine translators (FMTs) in «league table» format shows what a user can expect from an individual FMT in terms of translation quality. Our rankings are a first tentative step towards allowing the user to make an informed choice as to the most appropriate FMT for his/her source text and thus produce higher FMT target text quality.
Authors: Stephen Hampshire, Carmen Porta Salvía
Institution: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Language: Catalan
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1532809596