Post-Editing and NMT: Embracing a New Age of Translation Technology
This is a guest post by Rodrigo Fuentes Corradi and Andrea Stevens from the SDL MT project management team.
SDL is unique amongst LSPs as they have both deep MT development expertise, and also have a large pool of in-house professional translators who can communicate much more easily with the MT development and management team on engine specifics, and provide the kind of feedback that leads to best practices in MTPE projects and delivers overall superior quality. MT in many localization contexts only works if it indeed delivers output that is useful to translators rather than frustrates them. This quality is best achieved by an active and productive (constructive) dialogue between translators, project managers, and developers, which is the modus operandi at SDL.
While most MT developers have a strong preference for using automated quality metrics like BLEU and LEPOR, the SDL MT project management teams have discovered many years ago, that competent human assessments are much more reliable to determine if an MT system is viable or not for an MTPE project. They have developed very reliable methods to make this determination efficiently and effectively. NMT presents special challenges in MTPE use scenarios, as the automated metrics are generally even less reliable than they have been with SMT. NMT fluency can sometimes veil accuracy and thus special training and modified strategies are needed as this post describes. Also, we often see that the quality of the MT output can be significantly better than a BLEU score might suggest as this metric is often lower for NMT systems for various reasons.
We are beginning to see other research that suggests that NMT does often provide productivity benefits over SMT, but that it requires special updated training and at least some understanding of the new challenges presented to established production processes by the compelling but sometimes inaccurate fluency of NMT systems.
Post-editing means different things to different people. To the corporate world, it means making localization budgets go further by translating more for less. To freelance translators, it may well mean an infringement of their craft and livelihood. We know that freelance careers are the result of several years of study, hard work and perseverance to create a client portfolio based on a reputation for quality, consistency and on-time delivery.
Language Service Providers like SDL are often stuck in the middle, working to satisfy the complex demands of our clients while nurturing the linguistic and creative talent in our supply chain. The truth is that in today’s localization market, Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE) is very much a reality and an answer to the unstoppable content explosion that we are experiencing.
How do we find a balance and how can we, as an LSP committed to machine translation (MT) and post-editing, do the impossible and manage both client expectations and supply chain needs?
At the heart of the conundrum lies content. What content needs to be developed and translated, what is its purpose, who does it serve, and how can our clients bring it to their customers in the most appropriate and cost-efficient way possible? Content and how well it communicates to a local audience is what defines a company in today’s fast-moving markets. As a business changes and evolves, so does content, creating the need for almost constant innovation and reinvention. This undoubtedly poses a challenge for translators who need to commit to life-long learning to understand new concepts, trends, and challenges and produce materials in the target language that are fully adapted to local markets and audiences.
Content keeps growing exponentially and our challenge is to understand the vast amounts of diverse content that our customers create and how to best deal with it. All content has value and answers a specific requirement, but for example, there is a difference between content created for a technical knowledge base, content for an advertising feature or even regulatory content. For content that has a short shelf-life, a straight MT solution without human intervention may be perfectly acceptable whereas, at the other end of the spectrum, more creative content may require specialized translators or transcreation. In between, there is a wide range of content that could be best served with a hybrid human and machine approach.
As a translation work-giver and machine translation provider, it’s up to us at SDL to navigate the challenges posed by the ongoing content explosion in partnership with our clients and our supply chain. We need to be realistic about the role that MTPE plays in today’s translation marketplace and acknowledge the advantages for all involved. At the same time, challenges and constraints cannot be swept under the rug, but need to be openly addressed and discussed for full transparency.
One of the challenges is to make post-editing sustainable. Post-editing is established as a standard solution for a wide variety of content types and language pairs. The application of MT is constantly pushed further by the commercial need to respond to the overall content growth while dealing with limited or unchanged localization budgets. As a result, the MTPE footprint continues to expand beyond initially successful languages and domains into new territories, such as regulatory life sciences content or even marketing.
To do this successfully, we rely on technology advances and improvements, some of which have only become possible over the last one to two years. Customized solutions and real-time adaptive machine translation are among the tools that improve the post-editing experience for translators, but the biggest step forward is surely the arrival of Neural Machine Translation.
How is NMT achieving this? In short, NMT uses artificial neural networks which are based on mimicking the human brain with its interconnected neurons that help us understand the world around us, what we see, touch, smell, taste or hear. An NMT system learns from observing correlations between the source and the target text and modifies itself to increase the likelihood of producing a correct translation. While NMT is inspired by the way the human brain works, it does not learn languages quite like humans do – humans learn to speak to communicate with each other in a wide social context. NMT systems are still trained on bilingual data sets but promise noticeable uplift in translation quality through a more efficient framework for learning translation rules. NMT systems use an input layer where the text for translation is fed into the system, a hidden layer or multiple hidden layers where processing takes place and an output layer where we obtain the translation.
One of the main advantages of NMT is the very fluent translation output. However, it is important to understand that the very fluent output can sometimes mask the fact that the content of the automated translation is not correct.
This is just one of the reasons why post-editing is still so important, even when working with NMT output. It is essential that translators understand the behaviors and patterns of NMT to be able to take full advantage of this promising technology.
To prepare translators for working with NMT, training and active engagement with the supply chain is essential. This is part of a much larger training effort that includes our soon to be updated Post-Editing Certification Program. Training will not only help our vendors to prepare for working with new technologies but also ensure that everyone is ready for the technological expansion of MTPE.
Being a good work giver is key to jointly face new challenges along with our supply chain. Increasingly, this means guiding projects with an expert understanding of tools, domains, processes and intended audience. The combination of these factors will bring sustained success and quality continuity.
New technologies such as NMT can prove disruptive; transparency and training will be key to reassure and prepare our vendors. One key challenge will be to align the improved NMT technology with post-editing experience and a strategy for on-boarding our supply chain.
The intent is to utilize NMT technology across a wide range of domains and content types, and it is important to collect valid data points to proactively assess the chances of success before reaching out to freelancers. Furthermore, when approaching freelancers, it has always been helpful to share these findings and provide guidelines for MT behaviors that can help their post-editing decisions.
In summary, so much of the success is centered on good communication, which is dependent on openness, sharing materials and providing channels to discuss issues and answer questions. In this respect, we see a responsibility to drive these initiatives with a structured communication plan that includes webinars and open days held in our language offices.
SDL is unique amongst LSPs as they have both deep MT development expertise, and also have a large pool of in-house professional translators who can communicate much more easily with the MT development and management team on engine specifics, and provide the kind of feedback that leads to best practices in MTPE projects and delivers overall superior quality. MT in many localization contexts only works if it indeed delivers output that is useful to translators rather than frustrates them. This quality is best achieved by an active and productive (constructive) dialogue between translators, project managers, and developers, which is the modus operandi at SDL.
While most MT developers have a strong preference for using automated quality metrics like BLEU and LEPOR, the SDL MT project management teams have discovered many years ago, that competent human assessments are much more reliable to determine if an MT system is viable or not for an MTPE project. They have developed very reliable methods to make this determination efficiently and effectively. NMT presents special challenges in MTPE use scenarios, as the automated metrics are generally even less reliable than they have been with SMT. NMT fluency can sometimes veil accuracy and thus special training and modified strategies are needed as this post describes. Also, we often see that the quality of the MT output can be significantly better than a BLEU score might suggest as this metric is often lower for NMT systems for various reasons.
We are beginning to see other research that suggests that NMT does often provide productivity benefits over SMT, but that it requires special updated training and at least some understanding of the new challenges presented to established production processes by the compelling but sometimes inaccurate fluency of NMT systems.
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Post-editing means different things to different people. To the corporate world, it means making localization budgets go further by translating more for less. To freelance translators, it may well mean an infringement of their craft and livelihood. We know that freelance careers are the result of several years of study, hard work and perseverance to create a client portfolio based on a reputation for quality, consistency and on-time delivery.
Language Service Providers like SDL are often stuck in the middle, working to satisfy the complex demands of our clients while nurturing the linguistic and creative talent in our supply chain. The truth is that in today’s localization market, Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE) is very much a reality and an answer to the unstoppable content explosion that we are experiencing.
How do we find a balance and how can we, as an LSP committed to machine translation (MT) and post-editing, do the impossible and manage both client expectations and supply chain needs?
At the heart of the conundrum lies content. What content needs to be developed and translated, what is its purpose, who does it serve, and how can our clients bring it to their customers in the most appropriate and cost-efficient way possible? Content and how well it communicates to a local audience is what defines a company in today’s fast-moving markets. As a business changes and evolves, so does content, creating the need for almost constant innovation and reinvention. This undoubtedly poses a challenge for translators who need to commit to life-long learning to understand new concepts, trends, and challenges and produce materials in the target language that are fully adapted to local markets and audiences.
Content keeps growing exponentially and our challenge is to understand the vast amounts of diverse content that our customers create and how to best deal with it. All content has value and answers a specific requirement, but for example, there is a difference between content created for a technical knowledge base, content for an advertising feature or even regulatory content. For content that has a short shelf-life, a straight MT solution without human intervention may be perfectly acceptable whereas, at the other end of the spectrum, more creative content may require specialized translators or transcreation. In between, there is a wide range of content that could be best served with a hybrid human and machine approach.
As a translation work-giver and machine translation provider, it’s up to us at SDL to navigate the challenges posed by the ongoing content explosion in partnership with our clients and our supply chain. We need to be realistic about the role that MTPE plays in today’s translation marketplace and acknowledge the advantages for all involved. At the same time, challenges and constraints cannot be swept under the rug, but need to be openly addressed and discussed for full transparency.
“While NMT is inspired by the way the human brain works, it does not learn languages quite like humans do – humans learn to speak to communicate with each other in a wide social context.”
One of the challenges is to make post-editing sustainable. Post-editing is established as a standard solution for a wide variety of content types and language pairs. The application of MT is constantly pushed further by the commercial need to respond to the overall content growth while dealing with limited or unchanged localization budgets. As a result, the MTPE footprint continues to expand beyond initially successful languages and domains into new territories, such as regulatory life sciences content or even marketing.
To do this successfully, we rely on technology advances and improvements, some of which have only become possible over the last one to two years. Customized solutions and real-time adaptive machine translation are among the tools that improve the post-editing experience for translators, but the biggest step forward is surely the arrival of Neural Machine Translation.
Neural Machine Translation
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has rightly been described as a revolution rather than an evolution. With its core developed entirely from scratch, NMT offers amazing opportunities for innovation. Its powerful architecture paradigm does not only capture text or syntax information but actual meaning and semantics, leading to the improvements in translation quality that we are seeing across the board. This is something all MT providers, including SDL, agree on after extensive testing across language pairs and combinations. How is NMT achieving this? In short, NMT uses artificial neural networks which are based on mimicking the human brain with its interconnected neurons that help us understand the world around us, what we see, touch, smell, taste or hear. An NMT system learns from observing correlations between the source and the target text and modifies itself to increase the likelihood of producing a correct translation. While NMT is inspired by the way the human brain works, it does not learn languages quite like humans do – humans learn to speak to communicate with each other in a wide social context. NMT systems are still trained on bilingual data sets but promise noticeable uplift in translation quality through a more efficient framework for learning translation rules. NMT systems use an input layer where the text for translation is fed into the system, a hidden layer or multiple hidden layers where processing takes place and an output layer where we obtain the translation.
“When meaning and semantics are represented through math, words with similar meanings tend to cluster together.”
The hidden layer contains a vast network of neural nodes where the input is encoded into a vector of numbers to give a predictive output. Essentially, we are applying math to the problem of language and translation. When meaning and semantics are represented through math, words with similar meanings tend to cluster together. This is how we know that the NMT system starts to learn the semantics of words. When words have several meanings, they appear in different clusters; for example, ‘bank’ can appear in the geography or the finance cluster. It is then even possible to apply further math to the vectors, as shown in the graphic below: if you take the vector ‘king,’ subtract the vector ‘man’ and add the vector ‘woman,’ the result is a vector that is exactly or very close to the vector ‘queen.’
For NMT, we use deep neural networks, which are better for long-range context and dependencies. This is particularly important when it comes to languages for which the benefits of statistical machine translation were limited. Good examples are language pairs with long distance word traveling such as Japanese, where the clause structure is very different from English, or languages with long-distance dependencies such as German and Dutch.
This is just one of the reasons why post-editing is still so important, even when working with NMT output. It is essential that translators understand the behaviors and patterns of NMT to be able to take full advantage of this promising technology.
To prepare translators for working with NMT, training and active engagement with the supply chain is essential. This is part of a much larger training effort that includes our soon to be updated Post-Editing Certification Program. Training will not only help our vendors to prepare for working with new technologies but also ensure that everyone is ready for the technological expansion of MTPE.
Working Together
Being a good work giver is key to jointly face new challenges along with our supply chain. Increasingly, this means guiding projects with an expert understanding of tools, domains, processes and intended audience. The combination of these factors will bring sustained success and quality continuity.
New technologies such as NMT can prove disruptive; transparency and training will be key to reassure and prepare our vendors. One key challenge will be to align the improved NMT technology with post-editing experience and a strategy for on-boarding our supply chain.
The intent is to utilize NMT technology across a wide range of domains and content types, and it is important to collect valid data points to proactively assess the chances of success before reaching out to freelancers. Furthermore, when approaching freelancers, it has always been helpful to share these findings and provide guidelines for MT behaviors that can help their post-editing decisions.
In summary, so much of the success is centered on good communication, which is dependent on openness, sharing materials and providing channels to discuss issues and answer questions. In this respect, we see a responsibility to drive these initiatives with a structured communication plan that includes webinars and open days held in our language offices.
We are witnessing the ongoing growth of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in many aspects of our daily lives, from self-driving cars to medical diagnosis and intervention. Technology is a huge part of how we live and what we do, and this particularly holds true for translators. Post-editing works at the intersection of humans and machines, and machine translation is one of the most advanced tools in the translators’ toolbox to future-proof the profession for a new generation of translators. MTPE is, of course, a choice that everyone needs to make for themselves, but with new technologies such as Adaptive or Neural MT working for translators and the growing reach of MT into new domains, this is not a choice to be taken lightly. Technology developments are not reducing the role of translators, but rather, are changing and enhancing it, opening a host of new opportunities. This is a journey we need to embark on together for continued learning, support, and feedback.
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| Rodrigo Fuentes Corradi |
MT Business Consultant, SDL
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| Andrea Stevens |
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