Machine Translation Levels

 
This infographic is intended to help us better understand the different approaches to machine
translation. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) publishes a standard, SAE J3016, which
describes levels of driving automation. This has six levels of driving automation from level 0
where there is no automation to level 5 which is the highest level of driving automation, the
driverless car.

I have used SAE J3016 as a model to do something similar for machine translation (MT). The
levels are from MT level 0 where there is no use of machine translation to MT level 5 where there
is human intervention.

The levels in our infographic are:

MT Level 0
With this level a professional translator will use translation memory, terminology and other
resources but will not use MT.

MT Level 1
With MT level 1 the translation memory technology is being augmented by technology which
comes from MT such as fragment assembly. memoQ’s MatchPatch is a good example of this.

MT Level 2
With MT level 2 the translator is using MT as a source of suggestions within the CAT tool/ TMS in
much the same way as the use suggestions from a translation memory.
MT Level 3
With MT level 3 the entire document is translated and then post-edited by a professional linguist.

MT Level 4
With MT level 4 the process is almost totally automated with QA and MT specialists managing
the system and looking for errors that they can use to improve the overall quality of the system.
There is a lot of work put into improving the quality of the engine and the data which helps train
and improve it.

MT Level 5
MT level 5 is when an MT engine is being used without the intervention of a professional linguist
or QA specialist. Some smaller companies will use the MT output from engines such as Google
Translate as is. If you do this you probably do not know whether the translation is correct or not
and there are clear dangers associated with this. MT Level 5 is usually not used for serious
translation work

MT levels 0 to 3 need to a professional linguist. For level 3 this can be a post-editor and for level
0 to 2 it is a professional translator. A CAT tool/ TMS is the best environment for the linguist to
work. The increasing use of neural machine translation (NMT) makes the involvement of a
professional linguist even more important. While NMT has significantly improved the quality of
MT engines it also has introduced new errors where the target text might look correct but is not.
A professional linguist looking at the source and target text in a CAT tool is the best way to deal
with these sorts of errors.
MT level 4 can benefit from Linguistic Quality Assurance functionality found in a TMS.