Machine Translation Errors
Sherri L. Condon, Dan Parvaz, John S. Aberdeen, Christine Doran, A. Freeman, Marwan Awad · ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing · 2011
Errors in machine translations of English-Iraqi Arabic dialogues were analyzed using the methods developed for the Human Translation Error Rate measure (HTER). Human annotations were used to refine the Translation Error Rate (TER) annotations. The analyses were performed on approximately 100 translations into each language from four translation systems. Results include high frequencies of pronoun errors and errors involving the copula in translations to English. High frequencies of errors in subject/person inflection and closed-word classes characterized translations to Iraqi Arabic. There were similar frequencies of word order errors in both translation directions and low frequencies of polarity errors. The problems associated with many errors can be predicted from structural differences between the two languages. Also problematic is the need to insert lexemes not present in the source or vice versa. Some problems associated with deictic elements like pronouns will require knowledge of the discourse context to resolve.