Chapter 10. Impact of word alignment on word translation entropy and other metrics

Abstract

Many of the findings from studies using the Center for Research and Innovation in Translation and Translation Technology (CRITT) Translation Process Research Database (TPR-DB) framework rely on word(s)-to-word(s) alignments of the source text and target text. However, little research has been done on the impacts different alignment methods have on these findings. This study compares two different manual word alignment methods and four automatic word alignment methods on the basis of one English-Spanish TPR-DB study that has been used extensively (the BML12 dataset). We replicate past findings from the BML12 dataset using these different alignments in order to determine the impact of alignment, and we present qualitative/quantitative analyses of the different word-alignment methods.