Deciding between generic or customized MT engines

What should you consider before deciding?

Choosing the right MT engine can be challenging, especially if you don’t know which engine has the best features and customizations for your project. 

Implementing the wrong MT engine, whether generic or customized, can lead to poor results and higher costs, resulting in linguistic mistakes that are out of context and lack any specific writing style. 

When translating a text with a professional translator specialized in, for example, Banking or Marketing, the final result can lead to higher accuracy in the text. The same will happen if we work with a customized MT engine trained in a specific domain with additional contextual information to increase accuracy in the final project. 

There are different levels of performance in a customized MT engine. So here are some things to consider when choosing the correct MT.

• Content-type
• Language pairs
• Time available
• Budget

Choosing the right MT engine can take time. Therefore, getting feedback from the translators and post-editors working on the project is essential. 

In Episode 5, our expert Laura Casanellas tells us more about the different types of MT engines you can find and tips for choosing the right MT and what to consider.

In this episode, Patricia Freitag, our expert in translation and post-editing, also shares her experience and gives some examples of common mistakes when translating with a generic or customized engine. 

“There are many common errors, some are bigger, and some are easier to spot,” says Patricia Freitag. 

That is why the post-editor must work as part of the process to detect any issues in the translation. 

Some examples of issues our expert Patrica shared are:  

• Words that can be used in many industries like “chip.” Depending on the context, the meaning can change. 
• Punctuation issues like .pdf – some MT would put a space after the period
• Product names – e.g., YouTube
• Association between segments can be an issue when translating from ENG to POR, for example.

You can watch more common errors and examples to consider when choosing an MT engine for your projects in Episode 6 – Usual and unusual errors in Portuguese- The TextTrans experience.

In most cases and projects, a machine translation post-editing expert will be required to eliminate issues and provide better quality for the project. 

In conclusion, choosing the best MT engine will depend on the project. 

We encourage you to watch our video series ‘Adventures in Machine Translation’ to help you choose the right generic or customized MT engine and the things you should consider before making the final decision. 

You can also contact us at TextTrans; we will be happy to provide you with more information.

And if you want to know more about our experts, you can watch Episode 1 of our adventure series.