Codified Close Translation as a Standard for MT

This paper proposes that quality criteria are set up for machine translation systems that attempt to capture what can be considered the upper limit for the performance of MT systems. It argues that the best performance MT currently should aim for is close translation, and that attempts should be made to codify what that entails for any given language pair. Some guidelines for the selection of close translations are proposed and their application on concrete examples drawn from an English-Swedish parallel corpus is discussed. The definition of different quality levels in relation to a high-quality standard is also