Investigating the usefulness of machine translation for newcomers at the public library

Abstract

This study investigates the potential of machine translation for offering an efficient and cost-effective means of translating sections of the Ottawa Public Library website into Spanish to better meet the linguistic needs of the Spanish-speaking newcomer community. One-hundred and fourteen community members participated in a recipient evaluation, where they evaluated four different versions of a translated portion of the library’s website—a professional human translation, a maximally post-edited machine translation, a rapidly post-edited machine translation, and a raw machine translation. Participants also considered metadata such as the time and cost required to produce each version. Findings show that while machine translation cannot address all needs, there are some needs for which the faster and cheaper post-edited versions are considered to be useful and acceptable to the community.