SORT: An Interactive Source-Rewriting Tool for Improved Translation

The quality of automatic translation is affected by many factors. One is the divergence between the specific source and target languages. Another lies in the source text itself, as some texts are more complex than others. One way to handle such texts is to modify them prior to translation. Yet, an important factor that is often overlooked is the source translatability with respect to the specific translation system and the specific model that are being used. In this paper we present an interactive system where source modifications are induced by confidence estimates that are derived from the translation model in use. Modifications are automatically generated and proposed for the user’s approval. Such a system can reduce postediting effort, replacing it by cost-effective pre-editing that can be done by monolinguals.