Evaluating Statistical Machine Translation from English to Dutch

In this paper, I attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of using statistical machine translation to translate an English text into Dutch, using empirical evaluation and the Bleu evaluation metric. I also give a brief overview of the theory behind statistical machine translation and automated translation evaluation metrics. I have translated a sample of the English proceedings of the European Parliament into Dutch and compared it to reference translations from the Dutch proceedings. I also compared them to translations of the same texts using the Babelfish translation service. I concluded that statistical machine translation can provide a rough translation from English to Dutch, but it requires help from other translation techniques to produce a well-formed sentence.