Toward determining the comprehensibility of machine translation

How much impact have translation mistake on comprehension?

Two categories of mistakes were considered: missing words and word order in nine sentence types:

1. deleted verb
2. deleted adjective
3. deleted noun
4. deleted pronoun
5. modified preposition modified (in, on, at)
6. word order to SOV (subject, object, verb)
7. modified word order to VOS
8. modified word order to VSO
9. retained SVO word order

20 testers were asked to asses the quality of the translations.

Conclusions
Both verb and adjective deletion create big issues in text comprehension.
The limit of this research lies on the text samples: they were too short. Further investigations are recommended on longer portions of texts.

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