A Case Study on Contextual Machine Translation in a Professional Scenario of Subtitling
This addresses the problem of contextual inadequacy in machine translation for professional subtitling, though it is incremental as it builds on prior work.
The study investigated whether incorporating extra-textual context like film metadata improves machine translation quality in professional TV subtitle translation, finding that post-editors marked significantly fewer context-related errors when using a context-aware model compared to non-contextual models.
Incorporating extra-textual context such as film metadata into the machine translation (MT) pipeline can enhance translation quality, as indicated by automatic evaluation in recent work. However, the positive impact of such systems in industry remains unproven. We report on an industrial case study carried out to investigate the benefit of MT in a professional scenario of translating TV subtitles with a focus on how leveraging extra-textual context impacts post-editing. We found that post-editors marked significantly fewer context-related errors when correcting the outputs of MTCue, the context-aware model, as opposed to non-contextual models. We also present the results of a survey of the employed post-editors, which highlights contextual inadequacy as a significant gap consistently observed in MT. Our findings strengthen the motivation for further work within fully contextual MT.