MACHINE TRANSLATION – CAN IT ASSIST IN PROFESSIONAL TRANSLATION OF CONTRACTS?
PDF

Keywords

machine translation
professional translation
legal translation
legal contract

How to Cite

SYCZ-OPOŃ, J. (2016). MACHINE TRANSLATION – CAN IT ASSIST IN PROFESSIONAL TRANSLATION OF CONTRACTS?. Comparative Legilinguistics, 20, 81–100. https://doi.org/10.14746/cl.2014.20.06

Abstract

The aim of this research project is to verify whether machine translation (MT) technology can be utilized in the process of professional translation. The genre to be tested in this study is a legal contract. It is a non-literary text, with a high rate of repeatable phrases, predictable lexis, culture-bound terms and syntactically complex sentences (Šarčević 2000, Berezowski 2008). The subject of this study is MT software available on the market that supports the English-Polish language pair: Google MT and Microsoft MT. During the experiment, the process of post-editing of MT raw output was recorded and then analysed in order to retrieve the following data:

(i)                  number of errors in MT raw output,

(ii)                 types of errors (syntactic, grammatical, lexical) and their frequency,

(iii)               degree of fidelity to the original text (frequency of meaning omissions and meaning distortions), 

(iv)               time devoted to the editing process of the MT raw output.

The research results should help translators make an informed decision whether they would like to invite MT into their work environment.
https://doi.org/10.14746/cl.2014.20.06
PDF

References

Berezowski, Leszek. 2008. Jak Czytać i Rozumieć Angielskie Umowy. Warszawa: C.H. BECK.

Bijimol, T. K., and John T. Abraham. 2014. A Study of Machine Translation Methods. http://csidl.org/handle/123456789/675.

Fulford, H. 2002. Freelance Translators and Machine Translation: An Investigation of Perceptions, Uptake, Experience and Training Needs. In Proc. 6th EAMT Workshop, 117–22.

Fulford, Heather, and Joaquín Granell-Zafra. 2004. The Freelance Translator’s Workstation: An Empirical Investigation. In Proceedings of 9th European Association for Machine Translation Workshop, 53-61.

Graham, Yvette, Timothy Baldwin, Alistair Moffat, and Justin Zobel. 2014. “Is Machine Translation Getting Better over Time?” In Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2014), 443-451.

Hutchings, John. 2008. “Recent Developments in the Use and Application of Machine Translation.” http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/OUP-2008.pdf.

Hutchins, John. 2003. “Commercial Systems.” edited by Harold Somers. Computers and Translation: A Translator’s Guide. John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam, 161–74.

Hutchins, John. 2007. “Machine Translation: A Concise History.” Edited by C. Wai. Computer Aided Translation: Theory and Practice, Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Hutchins John. 2010. “Outline of Machine Translation Developments in Europe and America.” In JAPIO, 1–8. Tokyo.

Kit, Chunyu, and Tak Ming Wong. 2008. “Comparative Evaluation of Online Machine Translation Systems with Legal Texts.” Law Library Journal 100 (2): 299–321.

Koponen, M., W. Aziz, L. Ramos, and L. Specia. 2012. “Post-Editing Time as a Measure of Cognitive Effort.” In AMTA 2012 Workshop on Post-Editing Technology and Practice (WPTP 2012), 11–20.

Och, Franz. 2012. “Breaking down the Language Barrier - Six Years in.” Google Official Blog. April 26. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/breaking-down-language-barriersix-years.html.

Šarčević, Susan. 2000. New Approach to Legal Translation. Hague: Kluwer Law International.

Seljan, Sanja, Marija Brkić, and Vlasta Kučiš. 2011. “Evaluation of Free Online Machine Translations for Croatian-English and English-Croatian Language Pairs.” In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on the Future of Information Sciences: INFuture2011-Information Sciences and E-Society, 331–45.

Snover, M., B. Dorr, R. Schwartz, L. Micciulla, and J. Makhoul. 2006. “A Study of Translation Edit Rate with Targeted Human Annotation.” In Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA-2006), 223–31.

Zervaki, T. 2002. “Online Free Translation Services.” In Proceedings of the 24th Int. Conf. on Translating and the Computer.