Investigating the Influence of Bilingual MWU on Trainee Translation Quality

Yu Yuan, Serge Sharoff

Abstract: We applied a method for automatic extraction of bilingual multiword units (BMWUs) from a parallel corpus in order to investigate their contribution to translation quality in terms of adequacy and fluency. Our statistical analysis is based on generalized additive modelling. It has been shown that normalised BMWU ratios can be useful for estimating human translation quality. The normalized alignment ratios for BMWUs longer than two words have the greatest impact on measuring translation quality. It is also found that the alignment ratio for longer BMWUs is statistically closer to adequacy than to fluency.