In November, Dr Constantin Orasan gave a staff research seminar profiling his current and future research user study on Quality estimation for professional translators.  The paper was well received and there was an interesting debate and questions afterwards.

Title:  Quality estimation for professional translators: a user study

Abstract: 

Postediting of machine translation output has became an important step of the workflows employed by translation companies. The idea behind postediting is that it is possible to improve the productivity of professional translators by asking them to correct the output of machine translation systems rather than to translate from scratch. In cases in which the quality of translation is poor this is not necessary true. The field of quality estimation could prove useful to decide which sentences can be postedited and which should be translated from scratch. This talk will report the results of a user study which recorded the productivity of four professional translators when they were asked to postedit and translate sentences in different scenarios.

Our results show that quality estimation information, when accurate, improves post-editing efficiency. The analysis has also raised a number of questions which are worth being investigated.