Case study

In this case study, we look at a machine translation engine training project with a French LSP. We trained a set of MT engines and evaluated the performance both automatically and with a human eye with the client’s pool of linguists.

Language combination: French to English 

Domain: Financial documentation

Training dataset: 607k parallel segments (295k after cleanup)

BLEU scores attained: 44 and 43

There was a “Kasparov vs Deep Blue” moment when the machine won against a specialist human translation 5 out of 5. In our test, five specialist translators ran a blind test on a group of engines, among which human reference was hidden as another MT output. Without knowing which was which, the translators scored 96 segments for each engine from 5 (Perfect) to 1 (Useless). By the number of segments that needed no editing, the linguists placed human translation only in the 3^rd position.

The results

The trained engine gained a lot on every metric compared to the very strong stock engine from DeepL that the client used before:

The company is now implementing a new compensation scheme, while we’re analyzing mistakes still made by the machine to retrain it a couple of months down the road.

Error types

We estimate that the savings from upgrading to a trained engine will improve the LSP’s gross margins by more than 10% in 2021.

The machine does not always perform so well. In another evaluation, this time for English to Russian, humans won against every engine trained. Russian is a harder nut to crack for MT because it is an inflectional language. However, it still makes sense to train. The difference between stock and the best performing trained engine was huge; the client still gained +60% better MT performance after training.