Machine Translation and Post-editing

Machine Translation (MT) is the translation of text by a computer. There are two types of machine translation systems: rule-based and statistical systems. Rule-based systems use a combination of dictionaries and (grammar) rules. Statistical systems do not work with 'rules', but derive all information necessary to translate from large collections of texts. To produce high-quality translations, humans still need to intervene in the process either by making the input more suitable for MT (pre-editing) or changing the output (post-editing).

The course deals with the following topics:

• Challenges for MT
• Architecture of MT systems (rule-based MT, statistical MT and neural MT systems;  interactive and adaptive systems)
• Evaluation of MT output (automatic vs. manual evaluation methods)
• Post-editing and post-editing tools
• Integration of MT in the translation workflow
• Creation and evaluation of a customized MT engine