Human-Computer Interaction in Translation Activity: Fluency of Machine Translation

Digitalization is one of the key distinctive features of modern environment and social life. Nowadays more and more functions are transferred to the artificial mind. How effective is the replacement of human activity with computer activity? In the given article, this problem is solved by an example of integration of digital technologies into translation activities. It this paper, emphasis is placed on the quality of machine translation (MT) output of legal texts in the language pair English - Slovak. It studies a Criminal Code formulated in the Slovak language which was translated by a human translator into English and consequently via machine translation system Google Translate (GT) back into Slovak. The back-translation - translation of a translated text back into its original language - as a quality assessment tool to detect discrepancies, mistranslations and inevitable differences between the source text and the target text was used. The quality of MT output was evaluated according to Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) standards with the focus on the dimension of ‘Fluency’. The multiple comparisons were applied to determine which issues (errors) in ‘Fluency’ dimension differ from the others. A statistically significant difference is noticed between ‘Agreement’ and other issues, as well as between ‘Ambiguity’ and other issues. The errors in ‘Agreement’ are related to the differences between the languages: English is considered mostly an analytic language, Slovak represents a synthetic language. The issues in the ‘Ambiguity’ dimension correlate with the type of the text being examined, since legal texts are characterized by relatively complicated wording and numerous terms; moreover, accuracy and unambiguity need to be preserved. Generally, the MT output is able to provide users with basic information about the text. On the other hand, most of the segments need revision and/or correction; in such cases, human intervention and post-editing is necessary.