Information (Jul 2024)

Machine Translation for Open Scholarly Communication: Examining the Relationship between Translation Quality and Reading Effort

  • Lieve Macken,
  • Vanessa De Wilde,
  • Arda Tezcan

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/info15080427
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 15, no. 8
p. 427

Abstract

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This study assesses the usability of machine-translated texts in scholarly communication, using self-paced reading experiments with texts from three scientific disciplines, translated from French into English and vice versa. Thirty-two participants, proficient in the target language, participated. This study uses three machine translation engines (DeepL, ModernMT, OpenNMT), which vary in translation quality. The experiments aim to determine the relationship between translation quality and readers’ reception effort, measured by reading times. The results show that for two disciplines, manual and automatic translation quality measures are significant predictors of reading time. For the most technical discipline, this study could not build models that outperformed the baseline models, which only included participant and text ID as random factors. This study acknowledges the need to include reader-specific features, such as prior knowledge, in future research.

Keywords