Machine Translation Quality in Mobile Apps for Text-based Image Translation Cover Image

Machine Translation Quality in Mobile Apps for Text-based Image Translation
Machine Translation Quality in Mobile Apps for Text-based Image Translation

Author(s): Eglė Miltakienė
Subject(s): Language acquisition, Baltic Languages, Philology, Translation Studies, ICT Information and Communications Technologies
Published by: Vilniaus Universiteto Leidykla
Keywords: machine translation; image-to-text applications; translation quality assessment; translation errors; multidimensional quality metrics;

Summary/Abstract: With the advancement of mobile applications, now it is possible to perform instant text translation using a smartphone’s camera. Because text translation within images is still a relatively new field of research, it is not surprising that the translation quality of these mobile applications is under-researched. This study aims to determine the image-to-text translation quality in the English to Lithuanian language direction using popular machine translation apps. To classify errors and evaluate the quality of translation, the present study adopts and customizes the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework (Lommel 2014). The obtained results indicate that image-to-text machine translation apps produce exceptionally low-quality translations for the English-Lithuanian language pair. Therefore, the quality of machine translation for low-resource languages such as Lithuanian remains an issue.

  • Issue Year: 14/2021
  • Issue No: 14
  • Page Range: 56-70
  • Page Count: 15
  • Language: English