Towards desktop-based CAT tool instrumentation

John Moran, Christian Saam, Dave Lewis


Abstract
Though a number of web-based CAT tools have emerged over recent years, to date the most common form of CAT tool used by translators remains the desktop-based CAT tool. However, currently none of the most commonly used desktop-based CAT tools provide a means of measuring translation speed at a segment level. This metric is important, as previous work on MT productivity testing has shown that edit distance can be a misleading measure of MT post-editing effort. In this paper we present iOmegaT, an instrumented version of a popular desktop-based open-source CAT tool called OmegaT. We survey a number of similar applications and outline some of the weaknesses of web-based CAT tools for experi- enced professional translators. On the basis of a two productivity test carried out using iOmegaT we show why it is important to be able to identify fast good post-editors to maximize MT utility and how this is problematic using only edit-distance measures. Finally, we argue how and why instrumentation could be added to more commonly used desktop-based CAT tools that are paid for by freelance translators if their privacy is respected.
Anthology ID:
2014.amta-wptp.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Month:
October 22-26
Year:
2014
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Sharon O'Brien, Michel Simard, Lucia Specia
Venue:
AMTA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Note:
Pages:
99–112
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2014.amta-wptp.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
John Moran, Christian Saam, and Dave Lewis. 2014. Towards desktop-based CAT tool instrumentation. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, pages 99–112, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
Towards desktop-based CAT tool instrumentation (Moran et al., AMTA 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2014.amta-wptp.8.pdf