More than tweets: a critical reflection on developing and testing crisis machine translation technology
Cadwell, PatrickORCID: 0000-0002-2371-4378, O'Brien, SharonORCID: 0000-0003-4864-5986 and De Luca, Eric
(2019)
More than tweets: a critical reflection on developing and testing crisis machine translation technology.
Translation Spaces, 8
(2).
pp. 300-333.
ISSN 2211-3711
The application of machine translation (MT) in crisis settings is of increasing interest to
humanitarian practitioners. We collaborated with industry and non-profit partners: (1) to
develop and test the utility of an MT system trained specifically on crisis-related content in
an under-resourced language combination (French-to-Swahili); and (2) to evaluate the extent
to which speakers of both French and Swahili without post-editing experience could be
mobilized to post-edit the output of this system effectively. Our small study carried out in
Kenya found that our system performed well, provided useful output, and was positively
evaluated by inexperienced post-editors. We use the study to discuss the feasibility of MT use
in crisis settings for low-resource language combinations and make recommendations on data
selection and domain consideration for future crisis-related MT development.