Round-trip Translation: What Is It Good For?
HAROLD L. SOMERS · 2005
This paper considers the popular but questionable technique of ‘round-trip translation’ (RTT) as a means of evaluating free on-line Machine Translation systems. Two experiments are reported, both relating to common requirements of lay-users of MT on the web. In the first we see whether RTT can accurately predict the overall quality of the MT system. In the second, we ask whether RTT can predict the translatability of a given text. In both cases, we find RTT to be a poor predictor of quality, with high BLEU and F-scores for RTTs when the forward translation was poor. We discuss why this is the case, and conclude that, even if it seemed obvious that RTT was good for nothing, at least we now have some tangible evidence. 1