Lecture

After more than 60 years of research in machine translation (MT), the
resulting technology has finally begun to be adopted for purposes beyond
merely gisting. Many factors contributed for this change in the way MT is
perceived and used, including noticeable improvements in translation quality
and increasing demand. Evaluation campaigns have been showing steady progress
over the years for certain language pairs. Industry focused experiments have
reported significant gains in productivity by using MT systems as part of
their translation workflows, as well as significant cost reductions by using MT
instead of humans for inbound translation. The decision on whether or not to
adopt MT for a given purpose is directly related to the type of documents to
be translated, the use of the resulting translations, and arguably the level
of quality that is expected. However, while document types and uses are well
defined, a metric of quality that accommodates different needs is yet to be
established. In this talk I will outline a few success stories involving
MT and introduce an initiative towards formalising "quality"
for human an d machine translation led by the EU projects QTLaunchPad and QT21.