Effects of undertaking translation repair using back translation

Translation repair plays an important role in intercultural communication that involves machine translation. It can be used to create messages that have very few translation mistakes. The accuracy of the results of translation repair when an original sentence is rewritten has not yet been evaluated. The improvement brought about by translation repair has to be demonstrated in order to apply translation repair to multilingual communication. Therefore, we have evaluated the translation repair of Japanese-English, Japanese-Chinese, and Japanese-Korean translations using back translation. We have used test sentences with a character count ranging from 15 to 32. On the basis of these evaluation experiments, we have estimated the accuracy and the cost of translation repair. (1) After nearly six rounds of translation repair work in three languages, the average translation accuracy of the sentences used in the experiment was improved (the meaning of the translated sentences was almost the same as that of the original sentences). In the experiment, 65% of the sentences were improved to the level of highly accurate. Moreover, 99% of the sentences were improved to the level of moderately accurate. 2) The cost of repairing a sentence depended on the number of translation-difficult words or phrases that were contained in the sentence. When the quality of a translation was low, finding the word or phrase to be modified was a difficult task. Thus, the cost corresponded to the quality of the translation.