Outbound Translation User Interface Ptakopet: A Pilot Study

TL;DR

This paper introduces Ptakopet, an open-source system for outbound translation, and evaluates its effectiveness in aiding users to produce questions in a foreign language they do not speak, revealing insights into user strategies and translation reliability.

Contribution

It presents Ptakopet, a modular system for outbound translation, and provides an experimental study on its use with Czech speakers translating questions into German.

Findings

Round trip translation is effective for users with mid-range quality MT systems.

Users employ various strategies depending on the use case.

Ptakopet facilitates outbound translation tasks in real-world scenarios.

Abstract

It is not uncommon for Internet users to have to produce a text in a foreign language they have very little knowledge of and are unable to verify the translation quality. We call the task "outbound translation" and explore it by introducing an open-source modular system Ptakop\v{e}t. Its main purpose is to inspect human interaction with MT systems enhanced with additional subsystems, such as backward translation and quality estimation. We follow up with an experiment on (Czech) human annotators tasked to produce questions in a language they do not speak (German), with the help of Ptakop\v{e}t. We focus on three real-world use cases (communication with IT support, describing administrative issues and asking encyclopedic questions) from which we gain insight into different strategies users take when faced with outbound translation tasks. Round trip translation is known to be unreliable for evaluating MT systems but our experimental evaluation documents that it works very well for users, at least on MT systems of mid-range quality.