1. Translating and the Computer 39 London, 16 November 2017
Creating a tool for multimodal translation and post-editing on touch-screen devices
Carlos S. C. Teixeira,
Joss Moorkens, Daniel Turner, Joris Vreeke and Andy Way
ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology
Dublin City University (Ireland)

2. 2
THE TOOL
Goal: Full-fledged CAT tool for editing suggestions coming from machine translation (MT) and translation memories (TM)
Allows for interaction using multiple input modes: keyboard, mouse, touch screen, microphone
Browser-based, developed using the REACT framework
Incorporates accessibility features
Compliant with XLIFF standard (1.1 through 2.0)
Instrumented (logs user activities)

3. 3
THE TOOL
Minimalist interface
Lexicon - Babelnet

4. THE TOOL 4 Three main interaction modes: Keyboard & mouse Voice input
Touch (tile mode)
MENTION NEED TO DOUBLE-CLICK!

5. 5
MENTION NEED TO DOUBLE-CLICK!

6. 6
THE TEST
Materials:
Article in a multilingual corporate magazine (French, Spanish → English)
Split into 4 texts (303–321 words, 13–18 segments)
Pre-translated with Google Neural MT

7. 7

8. THE TEST 8 Four Post-editing tasks: Keyboard & mouse Voice OR Touch
Touch OR Voice
Free

9. THE TEST Data collection: Participants: 9 Internal logging feature
Screen recording (Flashback)
[Backup: Keystroke logging (Inputlog)]
Voice recording (interviews)
Participants:
10 Irish professional translators (6 FR → EN, 4 ES → EN)

10. THE TEST – Participants
1010
THE TEST – Participants
None
1 year

11. THE TEST – Participants
1111
THE TEST – Participants
Tablet
Kindle
None
Smartphone
Touch-screen laptop
Touch-screen desktop

12. THE TEST – Participants
1212
THE TEST – Participants
Other
None
DéjàVu X
memoQ
SDL Trados
Studio
Wordfast Pro

13. THE TEST – Participants
1313
THE TEST – Participants
Mouse
Keyboard
Speech recognition
Screen touch

14. 1414
RESULTS
Dragging feature not used

15. 1515
RESULTS
Dragging feature not used

16. RESULTS – User Feedback
1616
RESULTS – User Feedback
Input modes:
Nobody liked the touch mode (tile view)!

17. RESULTS – User Feedback – Main problems encountered
1717
RESULTS – User Feedback – Main problems encountered
General:
Position of target text box (1)
Keyboard & Mouse:
Not as functional as home systems (not used to keyboard) (1)
Speech recognition:
“Did not pick up what I said (sometimes)” (6)
Placement of words & Spacing (3)
Punctuation (2)
Capitalisation (2)
Here I’m focussing on the problems

18. RESULTS – User Feedback – Main problems encountered
1818
RESULTS – User Feedback – Main problems encountered
Screen touch:
Tile mode breaks up the sentence: “makes it hard to read” (both source and target), “no fluidity”, “can’t see the ‘shape’ of the sentence” (8)
Difficult to move tiles around (dragging not working as expected) (3)
“’Alien’ interface”, “Feels artificial”, “not intuitive” (3)
Slows you down (3)
“Unwieldy” (1)
“Frustrating” (1)
Not ergonomic (position of hands) (1)

19. RESULTS – User Feedback – Main problems encountered
1919
RESULTS – User Feedback – Main problems encountered
Other:
General lack of familiarity with tool and equipment (4)
Segmentation (1)

20. RESULTS – User Feedback
2020
RESULTS – User Feedback
How does the tool compare with other CAT tools?
Minimalist interface (2)
No Translation Memory (2)
Few keyboard shortcuts (1)

21. RESULTS – User Feedback
2121
RESULTS – User Feedback
Suggestions for improving the tool
Tile mode: Option to see source not as tiles
Increased accuracy for voice recognition
Option to Join / Split segments
Additional step for revision
Auto-suggest feature
More shortcuts (Comment, Concordance)

22. RESULTS – User Feedback
2222
RESULTS – User Feedback
Did you find the text difficult?
No: “good”, “fairly straightforward” (9)
Beginning more difficult than the rest (1)
Quality of the Machine Translation
“Very good”, “Quite good”, “Pretty good”, “Really good” (9)
“Reasonably good” (1)
No Likert scale

23. SUMMARY 2323 Editing environment well accepted
Voice input ‘surprisingly good’ and useful for participants
Touch screen with potential for being further explored

24. MOVING FORWARD Implement and test additional features: 2424
Translation Memory matches
Concordance
Join & Split segments
Lexicon
Search & Replace
Comments
File management capabilities
Accessibility features (W3C labelling standards & universal design principles)
Planning to run tests with blind translators (e.g. compatibility with screen readers)

25. MOVING FORWARD Improve existing features: 2525 Layout
Give more prominence to target text box and bring it closer to source text box
Voice
Automatic capitalisation and spacing
Better handling of punctuation (brackets, apostrophes, etc.)
Voice commands (copy, cut, paste, move to next, etc.)
Touch
Complete redesign and reconsideration of use cases

26. Translating and the Computer 39 London, 16 November 2017
Thank you!