Readability and Translatability Judgments for 'Controlled Japanese'
Anthony F. Hartley, Midori Tatsumi, Hitoshi Isahara, Kyo Kageura, Rei Miyata · 2012
Abstract We report on an experiment to test the ef-ficacy of ‘controlled language’ authoring of technical documents in Japanese, with respect both to the readability of the Jap-anese source and the quality of the Eng-lish machine-translated output. Using four MT systems, we tested two sets of writing rules designed for two document types written by authors with contrasting professional profiles. We elicited judg-ments from native speakers to establish the positive or negative impact of each rule on readability and translation quality. 1 Introduction It is widely acknowledged that the typological ‘distance’ between Japanese and English (the most common European target language for MT from Japanese) hampers the achievement of high-quality translation. We seek to address this challenge by investigating the feasibility of de-veloping a ‘controlled Japanese’ with explicit restrictions on vocabulary, syntax and style ade-quate for authoring technical documentation. Our starting point is sentences extracted from two types of document: consumer user manuals (UM) and company-internal documents articulat-ing the know-how of key employees (KH). UM are produced by professional technical authors, while KH are written as ‘one-offs’ by the em-ployees themselves, capturing their own know-how. Thus, there is a sharp difference in the ef-