This collection of scholarly articles asks the question How useful is translation technology? Pointing to the need for a widely used and reliable way to test the efficiency of language translation programs, the presenters show that commercial tools such as translation memories and translation workbenches are popular, and their developers find them useful in terms of productivity, consistency, or quality. However, these claims are rarely proven using objective comparative studies, and this group describes several new statistical approaches to more rigorous evaluation methods. -- Product Description.

This is the first volume that brings together research and practice from academic and industry settings and a combination of human and machine translation evaluation. Its comprehensive collection of papers by leading experts in human and machine translation quality and evaluation who situate current developments and chart future trends fills a clear gap in the literature. This is critical to the successful integration of translation technologies in the industry today, where the lines between human and machine are becoming increasingly blurred by technology: this affects the whole translation landscape, from students and trainers to project managers and professionals, including in-house and freelance translators, as well as, of course, translation scholars and researchers. The editors have broad experience in translation quality evaluation research, including investigations into professional practice with qualitative and quantitative studies, and the contributors are leading experts in their respective fields, providing a unique set of complementary perspectives on human and machine translation quality and evaluation, combining theoretical and applied approaches.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Technology provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the dynamically evolving relationship between translation and technology. Divided into five parts, with an editor's introduction, this volume presents the perspectives of users of translation technologies, and of researchers concerned with issues arising from the increasing interdependency between translation and technology. The chapters in this Handbook tackle the advent of technologization at both a technical and a philosophical level, based on industry practice and academic research. Containing over 30 authoritative, cutting-edge chapters, this is an essential reference and resource for those studying and researching translation and technology. The volume will also be valuable for translators, computational linguists and developers of translation tools.

Translation technologies are moulded by and impact upon humans in all sorts of ways. This state-of-the-art volume looks at translation technologies from the point of view of the human users – as trainee, professional or volunteer translators, or as end users of translations produced by machines. Covering technologies from machine translation to online collaborative platforms, and practices from ‘traditional’ translation to crowdsourced translation and subtitling, this volume takes a critical stance, questioning both utopian and dystopian visions of translation technology. In eight chapters, the authors propose ideas on how technologies can better serve translators and end users of translations. The first four chapters explore how translators – in various contexts and with widely differing profiles – use and feel about translation technologies as they currently stand, while the second four chapters focus on the future: on anticipating needs, identifying emerging possibilities, and defining interventions that can help to shape translation practice and research. Drawing on a range of theories from cognitive to social and psychological, and with empirical evidence of what the technologization of the workplace means to translators, Human Issues in Translation Technology is key reading for all those involved in translation and technology, translation theory and translation research methods.

Machine Translation (MT) has become widely used throughout the world as a medium of communication between those who live in different countries and speak different languages. However, translation between distant languages constitutes a challenge for machines. Therefore, translation evaluation is poised to play a significant role in the process of designing and developing effective MT systems. This book evaluates three prominent MT systems, including Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and Sakhr, each of which provides translation between English and Arabic. In the book Almahasees scrutinizes the capacity of the three systems in dealing with translation between English and Arabic in a large corpus taken from various domains, including the United Nation (UN), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Arab League, Petra News Agency reports, and two literary texts: The Old Man and the Sea and The Prophet. The evaluation covers holistic analysis to assess the output of the three systems in terms of Translation Automation User Society (TAUS) adequacy and fluency scales. The text also looks at error analysis to evaluate the systems’ output in terms of orthography, lexis, grammar, and semantics at the entire-text level and in terms of lexis, grammar, and semantics at the collocation level. The research findings contained within this volume provide important feedback about the capabilities of the three MT systems with respect to EnglishArabic translation and paves the way for further research on such an important topic. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of translation studies and translation technology.

Chiew Kin Quah draws on years of academic and professional experience to provide an account of translation technology, its applications and capabilities. Major developments from North America, Europe and Asia are described, including developments in uses and users of the technology.

The papers in this volume tell the story of a profession that is responding in a number of different ways to the advances in computer technology – of professionals who are streamlining their work, reducing repetitive tasks, eliminating manual operations, and in general increasing their productivity while at the same time achieving a more interesting and relaxed environment.