Student project: with free machine translation, is international English better than plain English?
TechScribe has one student project that is related to language translation. Possibly, you can do the project with other students.
You probably study languages or translation. You have the following skills:
- You have a good knowledge of grammar.
- You are a native speaker of one language other than English.
Project keywords: accuracy, automatic translation, automated translation, computer translation, fluency, global English, international English, language translation, machine translation, MT, online translation, plain English, quality.
Research question
With free machine translation software such as Google Translate, is the translation of 'international English' better than the translation of 'plain English'?
International English is optimised for an international audience (www.international-english.co.uk). International English is also known as 'global English', 'internationalised English', and 'worldwide English'.
According to Plain English Campaign, plain English is "… something that the intended audience can read, understand and act upon the first time they read it. Plain English takes into account design and layout as well as language."
Previous work
In 2008, Kohl published The Global English style guide: writing clear, translatable documentation for a global market. For an introduction, read 'The Global English style guide: a review'.
Kohl gives hundreds of grammatical guidelines for English that help to increase the quality of translation, both by translators, and by computers. Case studies show that for customised machine translation, internationalised text increases the quality of the machine translation.
Some evaluations show that if text is internationalised, usually, the quality of free machine translation is sufficiently good for people to understand a document (www.international-english.co.uk/mt-evaluation.html).
In research about the professional translation of plain English, "there was only weak support for the assumption that the use of Plain English in source documents significantly improves the quality of translated documents." (Leena Lujamaa-Reisner, Plain English: An investigation into the possibility of improving the quality of translated documents if the source documents are written in Plain English, Master's dissertation, 2010 (https://share.sdc.f-secure.com/n/50-17/share/LNKSI7nTlqn1dLf8wc3wITWROTqU/).
Project summary
Evaluate the machine translation of plain English text and equivalent international English text. Is the machine translation of international English better than the machine translation of plain English?
For the plain English source text, use text that is approved by an organisation that sells plain English services. In the UK, three commercial organisations sell an approval service for plain English:
- Plain English Campaign (www.plainenglish.co.uk)
- Plain Language Commission (www.www.clearest.co.uk)
- The Word Centre (www.wordcentre.co.uk).
Ideally, use text that comes from a large organisation. Possibly, use text that comes from a government organisation. We want to make the results public. Therefore, you must get copyright approval from the copyright owner. If necessary, TechScribe can help you to get permission to use the text.
TechScribe can write the equivalent international English text, or you can write the equivalent international English text.
If possible, for each pair of texts, do the following:
- Evaluate the translations in different languages. Possibly, you can do these evaluations with other students.
- Evaluate the translations from more than one machine translation product.
Talk with your project adviser to make sure that the project is suitable. If you have questions, or if you want to work on the project, then contact Mike Unwalla.
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