The ATA Chronicle - November/December 2022 - 32

GS
Despite the very large relevance
that MT plays in most of our
professional lives, very few
products have become profitable.
engine for the language
combination in question, and
if it's a language combination
like English>Spanish or
English>German (or vice
versa), those opinions may
stay educated even over a
period of time because the
output quality of those large
language combinations
doesn't change too much.
This might be different
for smaller language
combinations. If, for instance,
you work in Finnish,
Lithuanian, or Kazakh, the
output of the respective
MT engines might vary
significantly from month
to month. Why? Because
the corpora the engines are
trained on are relatively
small, and any addition might
have a significant impact
on the quality of the MT
output in comparison to its
competing engines.
Or let's take another
case. Say you run a midsize
language services provider
that often needs to work
with 20+ languages for
which you would like to use
MT (in whatever capacity).
Clearly, you don't have the
insight and knowledge about
which engine is the best for
each language pair. So, you
can subscribe to quarterly
reports that run tests on
large MT engines (right now:
Microsoft, Google, Amazon,
and DeepL) that will provide
a current readout on the
quality of the output of said
engines. Each engine and
language combination are
tested with two different
evaluation systems: the,
much maligned, BLEU
(bilingual evaluation
understudy) and the newer
COMET (Crosslingual
Optimized Metric for
Evaluation of Translation),
which itself is based on a
neural system. These systems
are not flawless in evaluating
the output, but they're able
to detect changes from one
report to the next, and that's
really what's potentially
interesting. (This is also
something that's otherwise
unavailable unless you use a
much more expensive system
like Intento-which, I was
recently told by Intento,
really doesn't focus on
smaller providers any more).
As an individual translator,
you can buy a quarterly
subscription for $29 for
two language combinations.
As a language services
provider, it'll cost you $299
for all 48 available language
combinations. You can see a
list of the available languages
and other information on the
Polyglot Technology site I
linked to on page 31.
There are still a few
shortcomings I imagine Achim
will eventually address. (For
example, it's not currently
possible to do assessments
of customized engines or
specific domains.) But, again,
if there's an uptake in the
system, I'm sure there will
be improvements.
For show-and-tell
purposes, you can download
an English>French report
from Polyglot Technology. If
you just want to have one
report but not subscribe, you
can pay the first subscription
fee, get the report, and then
unsubscribe again.
NOTE
1
See www.polyglot.
technology/p/
mt-decider.html.
Jost
Zetzsche is
a translation
industry and
translation
technology consultant. He
is the author of Characters
with Character: 50 Ways
to Rekindle Your Love Affair
with Language. jzetzsche@
internationalwriters.com
32 The ATA Chronicle | November/December 2022
www.atanet.org

https://polyglottech.gumroad.com/l/mtb-trial-fr-en https://polyglottech.gumroad.com/l/mtb-trial-fr-en http://www.polyglot.technology/p/mt-decider.html http://www.polyglot.technology/p/mt-decider.html http://www.polyglot.technology/p/mt-decider.html http://www.atanet.org

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