by Steve McClure, Mary Flanagan (contractor)

The difficulty of measuring the quality of automatic language translation systems (known as machine translation [MT]) has been an obstacle to widespread adoption. With systematic benchmark testing, categorization of errors, and effective dictionary customization, MT technology can yield significant cost and time savings, as well as improved consistency in translations.

"The adoption of any new technology by mainstream organizations is driven in part by how well the technology 'works.' The key metric for MT is the quality of the resulting translation. Not only is this a somewhat subjective measure, but its definition changes in the context of each application and user," says Steve McClure, a research vice president in IDC's Software Research Group. "Quality must be measured in the context of whether the user achieved its objective, not by what percentage of the translation was correct. By applying a proven process individually with each of its enterprise customers, SYSTRAN is ensuring acceptable levels of MT quality."

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