Post-editing of Technical Terms based on Bilingual Example Sentences (2023)

Abstract: As technical fields become ever more specialized, and with continuous emergence of novel technical terms, it may not be always possible to avail of bilingual experts in the field to perform translation. This paper investigates the performance of bilingual non-experts in Computer-Assisted Translation. The translators were asked to identify and correct errors in MT output of technical terms in patent materials, aided only by example bilingual sentences. Targeting English-to-Chinese translation, we automatically extract the example sentences from a bilingual corpus of English and Chinese patents. We identify the most frequent translation candidates of a term, and then select the most relevant example sentences for each candidate according to semantic similarity. Even when given only two example sentences for each translation candidate, the non-expert translators were able to post-edit effectively, correcting 67.2% of the MT errors while mistakenly revising correct MT output in only 17% of the cases.

## introduction post-editing of machine translation (mt) system output is now commonly incorporated as part of the workflow in the translation industry, since it can produce higher quality texts than manual translation @xcite . for texts in scientific or technical domains, it would be ideal to have bilingual domain experts to perform the post-editing. given the large number of specialized domains and language pairs, however, translators with the required skills are unfortunately not always available. it is therefore important to understand whether those without the full linguistic or technical background could still perform post-editing adequately. while previous research has explored the feasibility of monolingual post-editing @xcite , few studies have investigated how well bilingual non-experts can post-edit mt output of technical texts. this paper evaluates the performance of bilingual novice translators in identifying and correcting mt errors in technical term translation. to simulate a realistic scenario with time constraints, the translators are aided with only a small number of bilingual example sentences from a database of patents. these example sentences are automatically retrieved from patentlex, a large corpus of english and chinese patents @xcite , to illustrate the most likely translation candidates. results show that, despite their unfamiliarity with the domain, the translators managed to correct a majority (67.2%) of the mt errors, and mistakenly revised correct mt output in less than 17% of the cases. the rest of the paper is organized as follows. after sketching the research background (section 2), we describe the translation texts and bilingual example sentences (section 3). we then define the translation task (section 4) and report the results (section 5). ## research background although mt systems can often provide high-quality output, high-stakes translation assignments still require manual verification and editing. this can be a challenging task, especially in technical translation when the human translator is not an expert in the field. in this case, the translator may need to consult existing bilingual examples in context, in order to evaluate different translation options of a term @xcite . previous research has studied how well bilingual concordancing can assist novice translators in post-editing mt output of patents @xcite ). an in-domain bilingual corpus was shown to yield better translation quality than a general-domain one, but mt outputs from google and baidu outperformed the post-edited versions in terms of both bleu score and term accuracy. however, these results may not be conclusive because of possible variations in the concordancing process. the post-editing outcome could be significantly affected by the skills of the individual subjects in discerning relevant bilingual examples, and the amount of time and effort invested. our study mitigates these confounding factors by controlling the post-editing time and the set of bilingual examples provided (section 4). we use patentlex, a very large corpus of over 300k comparable chinese and english patents registered in separate jurisdictions, curated within a 10 year period @xcite . this corpus has served as the dataset in two chinese-english patent mt competitions, organized by ntcir in tokyo in 2009 and 2010, and won second place in the 2019 game changer innovation contest organized by taus in singapore. reflecting its high quality, mt models trained on this corpus have been shown to outperform generic mt tools such as google, baidu and microsoft in patent translation. ## experimental set-up 4.1 subjects our study involved 61 students enrolled in a master of arts programme in translation studies in hong kong. most of them newly or recently completed their undergraduate studies with a non-science major, and were therefore unlikely to be familiar with the subject domain of the translation materials (section 3.1). the students were divided into two groups of 20 students each and one group of 21 students. each student was asked to complete a translation task: answer a distinctive set of 4 translation questions designed in the same format, without the use of any dictionary or reference sources other than the mt outputs (section 3.1) and bilingual examples (section 3.2) translation bilingual example pairs candidate 访问 the bioreactor further includes a second substrate, wherein fangwen the second substrate is positioned adjacent to the 'access' first surface of the first substrate and defines a plurality of connection channels, each of the connection channels being formed so as to be in fluid communication with a corresponding one of the inlet port, the outlet port, the auxiliary port, and the access port. it would be desirable to provide a laparoscopic access apparatus jieru that would maintain a seal against the escape of gas from within a 'access' body cavity, that would enable large tissue samples to be withdrawn (gold) with a chosen area of the bottle designed to be flexible, a membrane cunqu switch, or any other type of pressure sensor, can be fitted to respond to 'access' the change of internal pressure within the bottle, when the access seal is broken, thus providing a method of interfacing the action of opening the bottle with a circuit. ## results our post-editing study involved 488 instances of term translation from english to chinese. these included 244 instances that required post-editing (pe) (left side of ## conclusion as technical fields become ever more specialized, and with continuous emergence of novel technical terms, it may not be always possible to avail of bilingual experts in the field to perform translation. in the age of artificial intelligence, translators are increasingly expected to function as post-editors. this paper has investigated the performance of bilingual but non-expert translators in post-editing. targeting english-to-chinese translation of technical terms in patents, we asked translators to post-edit these terms in mt output, aided only by bilingual example sentences that were automatically extracted from the patentlex database. the results show that, even in the absence of dictionaries and field knowledge, the subjects were in general fairly able to deduce word meaning and produce acceptable translations (75.4%) in decontextualized technical texts with the help of mt translations and the bilingual corpus of patentlex. in particular, they corrected a majority (67.2%) of the mt errors, and mistakenly revised correct mt output in less than 17% of the cases. the understanding of context and field knowledge remains crucial for highly accurate and professional translation. in the future, we plan to conduct larger-scale experiments to further shed light on the increasing efficiency and reliability of mt translation and bilingual corpora as indispensable tools for translators.