Tralogy II Conference on Human and Machine Translation

The Tralogy II conference takes place at CNRS headquarters in Paris on January 17th to 18th, 2013. The event brings together specialists in human translation and researchers in the field of machine translation, or more broadly speaking experts in automatic language processing, IT tools and the language industry. The specific themes of the conference is "the quest for meaning: where are our weak points and what do we need?" This second Tralogy conference is organised jointly by the CNRS (IMMI and INIST), the SFT, the European Commission (DGT, EC Representation in France), Paris Diderot University (UFR EILA), and AFFUMT. The conference program (day 1 and day 2) includes a number of interesting presentations given both in French and English. Connections between human and machine translators were considered in many presentations. For instance, Jan Hajic gave a talk on the topic "Meaning in Translation: Translators Teaching Machines". David Farwell's talk "Pragmatics and High Quality MT" was insightful. With his colleague Stephen Helmreich, Farwell has conducted research already for some time that takes the pragmatic level of language seriously into account. An example of the results of their research is the paper on "Pragmatics-based MT and the Translation of Puns".

Hans Uszkoreit, Director of DFKI Language Technology Lab and the Coordinator of the META-NET Network of Excellence, gave a talk on "Translation Quality Metrics for Human and Automatic Translation". The objectives of the work that takes place in the QTLaunchPad project, includes assembling and providing data and tools translation corpora, test suites, and tools for quality assessment, as well as creating a shared quality metrics. The current results are based on collaboration between DFKI, DCU, University of Sheffield, and ILSP Athens, and the consortium is extending in the future. Uszkoreit reminded the audience that quality measured by widely used measures such BLEU, NIST and METEOR does not indicate the type of quality problems. The basic goal is to provide both simplicity and sophistication taking into account that there are different tasks that are associated with different needs. Uszkoreit discussed a number of quality criteria related to language (lexical choice and terminology, ortohography, grammar, meaning ad accuracy, style, and punctuation) and document (structure, layout, fonts and styles, objects, and marking). Uszkoreit pointed out that sometimes the quality of the translation, when coming from a skillful human translator, can be even better than the quality of the source text.