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Machine translation
With machine translation (MT), precision and recall are critical to success. Every translation counts. The more curated and accurate the information you provide for your MT engines, the better they’ll perform.
One of the simplest ways to customize machine translation is using machine translation glossaries. Learn what they are, why they matter, and how to leverage them to improve MT output in the long run.
Glossaries, in the context of machine translation, are a collection of words and phrases with a preferred machine translation. They’re sometimes referred to as:
MT glossaries are similar to term bases, but instead of being used by linguists, they are designed to be used by machine translation software.
When attached to MT engines, glossaries help improve the quality of the MT output by ensuring that the MT engines correctly apply pre-determined terminology.
Before a source text is translated by an MT engine, it will compare the attached glossary file to the source text to identify terms that have a preferred translation and apply those.
It’s important to note that an MT glossary doesn’t re-train an engine—it simply overrides any appropriate term with a predetermined translation.
Machine translation software has dramatically improved in output quality over the past few years. Nevertheless, it still lacks the contextual understanding of a human translator.
This means it can make some very basic errors, especially when handling an ambiguous word or a term that has a specific meaning in a given context.
Since glossaries are adapted to a domain’s or company’s specific terminology, they help machine translation output be far more accurate than if the engine just drew from general-purpose data sets.
The steps that an MT engine usually follows are:
With an MT glossary included, MT engines add an intermediate step to the process:
Put another way, with the help of glossaries, the MT engine searches for matches and automatically applies them while translating.
For example, suppose you have a brand for a Bluetooth speaker called “Connected,” and you want to translate the following sentence into Spanish: “Your Connected device was not detected.”
Without an MT glossary, your MT engine would produce something like the following result: “No se ha detectado tu dispositivo conectado” (literal back-translation into English: “Your connected device was not detected”). As you can see, the brand name “Connected” has been translated as “conectado,” which would be incorrect in this case.
If you add the brand name “Connected” to your MT glossary, you can enforce the non-translatability of the term. In that case, the MT engine will produce this result: “No se ha detectado tu dispositivo Connected.” This is spot on—using an MT glossary significantly improves accuracy by automatically providing the desired translation.
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To ensure MT glossaries remain reliable and always up to date, here are a few best practices to follow:
To maximize the impact and accuracy of MT glossaries, it’s important to use them for specific types of terms:
At the same time, some morphological categories are less suitable to be documented and used in a machine translation glossary:
Translation management systems (TMS) allow localization managers not only to centralize and automate the localization workflow but also make full use of well-established translation technology like translation memories and glossaries.
Modern TMS solutions, like Phrase, enable the use and management of glossaries without the need to upload and manage them with each individual MT provider.
In Phrase, you can directly upload, edit, and use MT glossaries for all supported engines, which can significantly reduce the amount of deployment and management time.
MT glossaries are available as a part of Phrase Translate, the suite’s machine translation add-on. Besides MT glossaries, Phrase Translate subscribers can take advantage of a number of fully managed machine translation and advanced AI-powered features like MT quality estimation and MT autoselect.
Through Phrase Translate, users can also add their own MT glossaries, which they can apply to fully managed MT engines:
As soon as you create a custom glossary, you need to attach it to an existing MT profile. You can create multiple MT glossaries and use them for different translation projects.
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MT glossaries are a simple and effective way to increase machine translation output quality. This is especially true for:
Nevertheless, MT glossaries come with limitations as well. At some point, an MT glossary can get so large that it can hinder localization managers who manage it—regular updates may become a headache and have a higher risk of accidentally introducing errors.
Equally important, most MT glossaries available on the market still have a search-and-replace functionality. With the continuous improvement in MT technology, engines are expected to get even better and let everyone use glossary terms with morphologically correct inflections.
To make the most of their machine translation efforts, localization managers should always prioritize their needs and available resources before deciding if custom machine translation glossaries are right for their use case.
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Last updated on April 25, 2023.