Outbound Translation User Interface Ptakopet: A Pilot Study
This addresses the challenge for internet users who must communicate in unknown languages, though it is incremental as it builds on existing MT and quality estimation methods.
The study tackled the problem of users needing to produce text in a foreign language without verification by introducing Ptakopět, an open-source system for outbound translation, and found that round-trip translation works well for users on mid-range MT systems.
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 Ptakopět. 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 Ptakopět. 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.