Collaborative Translation by Monolinguals with Machine Translators

Daisuke Morita and Toru Ishida of Kyoto University have developed a system to help monolinguals work together using machine translation to create accurate document translation. Machine translation is really useful but is not always accurate. It sometimes produces output with grammatical errors that can cause the receiver to misunderstand the intended message.

In this system, the initial message is translated to the second language. Next the receiver edits the document to correct grammatical errors and clarify ambiguities as he or she thinks is correct. The document is then machine translated back to the sender. Now the sender checks this message to see if the receiver correctly understood the message. If so, they are finished. If the message comes back and the wrong idea is expressed. The original sender will rewrite the message that caused confusion to better convey the correct idea.

This sounds like a good idea but to me it sounds like miscommunication could still occur pretty frequently especially if one party decides to use cultural idioms. I do think it could be of some use though and is probably more accurate than machine translation alone.