At the TAUS User Conference, a number of attendees pitched brief proposals for achieving greater power and efficiency in the translation chain through innovations involving sharing and pooling ideas and effort. Mirko Plitt from Autodesk reckons that there is a community opportunity to measure post editor productivity in statistical machine translation output. He has found that post editors typically overestimate how long they take to repair translations. And when the output is particularly poor, there is not much productivity loss. So he would like to see more shared insight into exactly what happens in the post-editing process, so that the effort devoted to measuring increases in productivity and the usability of MT output can be clarified and simplified.

1. TAUS USER CONFERENCE 2010
LANGUAGE BUSINESS INNOVATION
4 – 6 OCTOBER / PORTLAND (OR), USA
TUESDAY 5 OCTOBER
COLLABORATE TO INNOVATE: AUTODESK

2. 3 minutes for a couple of
observations from production
experience
Not an in-depth discussion of theoretical and practical
implications of the use of statistical algorithms
integrated into the localization and translation
processes implemented at Autodesk for a subset of
languages currently being expanded from four to
twelve.

3. The Day
Good MT
Turned
Evil

4. AutoLisp is still supported in Autodesk products.
AutoLISP est toujours pris en charge dans les produits Autodesk.
VBA is still supported in Autodesk products.
VBA n'est pas encore pris en charge dans les produits Autodesk.
Ouch.

5. I’m faster
translating
from scratch!
No, you’re not.
Post-Editing
Translation
Throughput

6. Snapshot across languages

7. Is this as bad as it gets?
Translation
Good MT
Poor MT
Throughput

8. Productivity Data vs Automated Metrics