ERROR ANALYSIS OF SYSTRAN OUTPUT - A SUGGESTED CRITERION FOR THE 'INTERNAL' EVALUATION OF TRANSLATION QUALITY AND A POSSIBLE CORRECTIVE FOR SYSTEM DESIGN
Frank Knowles · 1979
' only way! It is my personal conviction that the machine translation system developed under your guidance and improved under government contract represents the only viable translation option available to the nation for servicing bulk translation requirements in the interests of national defense.' 'We feel that computerised machine translation (SIC) is not only feasible and economical but the only way to provide bilingual technical manuals. It provides us with a text which is completely acceptable for use by technicians.' '...present users include the government of the USA, the government of Canada, the European Economic Community, and a range of industrial companies including some of North America's largest multinational corporations.' The above statements are excerpts - slightly adapted, but not substantially altered - from SYSTRAN sales literature distributed by WTC of Canada Ltd.; the first statement comes from the United States Air Force, the second from General Motors of Canada Ltd., and the third is WTC advertising copy. Against this background - indeed in spite of it - I should like to give some details of an error analysis which I have recently conducted on Russian texts translated into English by the SYSTRAN system. As I have said in a recent article, I cannot prove statistically that I was dealing, with average texts or indeed with an average machine translation system. 1 I will repeat myself by saying that I hope you will not be too scandalised if I say that I am intuitively satisfied that the texts I dealt with were not out of the ordinary and that the machine translation system which was responsible for the translation of those texts deserves attention firstly because it is one of the very few commercially operational machine translation systems in existence and secondly because the E.E.C. has made a considerable financial investment in it and is continuing to optimise the SYSTRAN system until such time as the proposed new EUROTRA system comes on line. The particular texts that I analysed were made available to me by Professor F. Kruckeberg and Mr D. Hoppe of the Gesellschaft fur Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung in Bonn, Germany, and I should like to record my considerable thanks to these gentlemen for their generous assistance. This institution carried out during 1976, on the basis of a licenced agreement with the WTC of La Jolla (California),U.S.A., a number of tests in order to assess the performance and general capabilities of the