A Concrete Example
Below is a very short French text, sampled from a larger document, which discusses several aspects of European Union law, as well as its English translation. Both source and target text are segmented into translation units (TUs) that are aligned side-by-side. Together, these segments make up the text that will be used to illustrate the principal parts of a TQE in Part A of this tutorial. Many intermediate files are generated over the course of a TQE. The files for Part A are provided for the reader in a public GitHub repository.
As will be discussed in Part B, the concrete example in Part A is far too short for a real TQE. While such a small sample size is not sufficient for a statistically significant evaluation, it is used here to demonstrate the basic principles of TQE.
| TU | Source Text (French) | Target Text (English) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Le Parlement européen a adopté, le 11 novembre 2015, une résolution sur la réforme de la loi électorale de l’Union européenne. | On November 11th, 2015, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the reform of the laws of the European Union. |
| 2 | Plusieurs principes ont alors été retenus: | Several principles were retained: |
| 3 | (1) l’organisation des élections sur la base d’un scrutin de liste ou d’un vote unique transférable de type proportionnel; | (1) conducting elections on the basis of proportional representation; using a list system or a single transferable ballot system; |
| 4 | (2) la suppression du cumul de tout mandat national avec celui de député européen; | (2) prohibiting the cumulation of any national office with one as Member of the European Parliament; |
| 5 | (3) la liberté pour les États membres de constituer des circonscriptions au niveau national; | (3) upholding the freedom of Member States to draw up constituencies at national level; |
In this concrete example, the evaluator works in a webapp to annotate segments of the above text for errors. For the sake of simplicity, this tutorial provides a read-only HTML version of what this webapp environment would look like after the evaluator has finished error annotation. It retains a level of interactability, so that the user may inspect errors by clicking on one of the yellow or orange error buttons to see the erroneous text highlighted.
It contains a source text on the left side and a target text on the right side. They have been segmented, meaning that they have been split into translation units, which are manageable chunks of text that correspond roughly to the size of a clause or short sentence. They have also been aligned, meaning that the source and target texts’ segments have been set side-by-side. Together, they form a text that has been annotated for translation errors and is now ready to be assigned a quality rating.
After annotation, the exported data can be scored. In our example, we calculate scores using an automatic tool that receives the annotation webapp’s exports and returns both a numeric quality score and a pass/fail quality rating. It also exports a summary of its calculations, as well as an error count table, in the form of an Excel spreadsheet.
The scoring process concludes the TQE. Each of these steps will be broken down further in Section A5.