MT providers claim that (customized) MT "helps you translate more words and grow your business". It "boosts productivity". And it can even "increase revenues" or "optimize customer service and support". What is the reality? Is MT improving or did we reach a plateau? Speakers at last year's QE Summit agreed: one of the main problems in the translation industry today is the lack of benchmarking. The output of MT engines cannot be compared to industry averages or standards because these are not yet available. Automated scores are meaningless outside the “laboratory”. At the same time, buyers of translation services are increasingly interested in translated content of different quality levels. They also want to know how the different engines are performing on different content types and in different language pairs. How do we know? Can we predict the output quality? Shouldn’t MT providers become more transparent to help buyers of these technologies make informed decisions? Session leader: Dag Schmidtke (Microsoft) Panelists: John Tinsley (Iconic), Olga Beregovaya (Welocalize), Olga Pospelova (eBay)

1. MT Quality: are we there yet?
TAUS QE Summit. 8th June 2016, Dublin
John Tinsley
CEO & Co-Founder

3. Quality
Required
Integratio
n Needs
TM
Leverage
Buyer
Maturity
Training
Data
Languag
e
Volume
Content
Factors influencing MT success
High TM
Leverage
Low MT
Effectiveness

4. Language
Not all languages are created equal
French German Turkish Finnish
Spanish Chinese Korean Hungarian
Portuguese Japanese Thai Basque

5. Quality
Required
Integratio
n Needs
TM
Leverage
Buyer
Maturity
Training
Data
Languag
e
Volume
Content
Factors influencing MT success
High TM
Leverage
Low MT
Effectiveness

6. Content Type
The bed was two twin beds put together and
me and my girlfriend kept fallin in the middle
(since we like to cuddle) and that was iritating
Late nite room service was awesome
Social Media
User Generated Content
Highly Technical
Marketing, Nuanced

7. Quality
Required
Integratio
n Needs
TM
Leverage
Buyer
Maturity
Training
Data
Languag
e
Volume
Content
Factors influencing MT success
High TM
Leverage
Low MT
Effectiveness

8. Training Data
Corpora. Dictionaries. Terminology.

9. Quality
Required
Integratio
n Needs
TM
Leverage
Buyer
Maturity
Training
Data
Languag
e
Volume
Content
Factors influencing MT success
High TM
Leverage
Low MT
Effectiveness

10. Quality requirements
• Fully automatic human quality
• 300% post-editing productivity
• French to Spanish == English to Korean
• Best performance out of the box