Perception vs. Acceptability of TM and SMT Output: What do translators prefer? (2018)

Abstract: This paper reports the results of two studies carried out with two different group of professional translators to find out how professionals perceive and accept SMT in comparison with TM. The first group translated and post-edited segments from English into German, and the second group from English into Spanish. Both studies had equivalent settings in order to guarantee the comparability of the results. It will also help to shed light upon the real benefit of SMT from which translators may take advantage.

## introduction machine translation (mt) remains unpopular among translators. even though mt seems to be rejected because of its lack of quality, translators may be reluctant to use mt for many other reasons @xcite . this paper tries to approach translators' perception of smt raw output in comparison with tm. for that purpose, two different studies were carried out. the first one involved seven professional translators @xcite . they were asked to rate 60 english-german translated segments. 30 of them were segments from a domain-appropriate tm, but without the quality threshold being set. the other 30 segments were translated through an smt system. this study was replicated (rico, sánchez-gijón and torres-hostench) with professional translators from english to spanish. ## aim of this proposal this paper aims to determine whether translators' reluctance to use mt correlates their preferences choosing translation suggestions. the research questions that will be addressed in this paper are: results will show that, in fact, mt acceptance increases when translation proposals are presented without metadata.