Product and Process Analysis of Machine Translation into the Inflectional Language

Abstract

This study focuses on the influence of quality of Machine Translation (MT) output on a translator’s performance. We analyze the translator’s effort by product analysis and process analysis. The product analysis consists of MT quality evaluation according to the Dynamic Quality Framework; using error typology and the criteria such as fluency and adequacy. We examine translator’s effort from the point of view of typing time, in the context of MT quality—focusing on error rate in language, accuracy, terminology, and style, and also in fluency and adequacy to the source text. We have found that the translator’s performance is influenced by MT quality. The typing time is very closely related to errors in language, accuracy, terminology, and style as well as to fluency and adequacy. We used the Mann-Whitney test to compare the productivity of post-editing of MT with human translation. The results of the study have shown that post-editing—compared to human translation of journalistic text from English into the inflectional Slovak language is more effective.