Challenging machine translation engines: some Spanish-English linguistic problems put to the test
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This work is an evaluation of machine translation engines completed in 2018 and 2021, inspired by Isabelle, Cherry & Foster (2017), and Isabelle & Kuhn (2018). The challenge consisted of testing MTs Google Translate and Bing and DeepL in the translation of certain linguistic problems normally found when translating from Spanish into English. The divergences representing a “challenge” to the engines were of morphological and lexical-syntactical types. The absolute winner of the challenge was DeepL, in second place was Bing from Microsoft, and Google was the engine that was the poorest in the management of the linguistic problems. In terms of time, when comparing the engines three years apart, it was found that DeepL was the only one that enhanced its performance by correcting a problem it had before in a test sentence. This was not the case for the other two, on the contrary, their translations were of lower quality. These machines do not seem to be consistent in the manner in which they are improved. These findings may be valuable for translators who may work with these systems as pre or post-editors so that their efforts may be better directed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".