Amazon Tops Overall Quarterly Survey by One Hour Translation of Neural Machine Translation Engines

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- One Hour Translation (OHT), the world's largest online translation agency and a leader in hybrid translations, announced that the Amazon Web Service (AWS) Amazon Translate engine performed the best on average of the five most popular Neural Machine Translation (NMT) engines, according to the results of the company's latest Q3-2018 ONEs - OHT NMT Evaluation score. ONEs is a unique human-based machine translation quality score.

Quality feedback of machine translation systems is essential for business users of professional translation services looking to cut costs and improve translation speed. The new neural machine translation engines offer very high-quality translations in an instant at a fraction of the cost of human translations. Currently machine translation is tested using computer programs such as BLEU. "Machine evaluation of machine translation is not good enough and is unable to accurately evaluate the translation quality of a specific machine translation engine," says Ofer Shoshan, CEO of OHT.

That's where ONEs - OHT NMT Evaluation score - plays a critical role by introducing the essential human element into the evaluation process. OHT introduced ONEs in Q2 2018.  Following the great interest in ONEs, OHT decided to add more languages—Arabic and Portuguese - and increase the number of engines compared to five, adding Amazon and Bing. The first ONEs focused on assessing general material only, while the current Q3 ONEs includes in addition, the travel and tourism category. The recent Q3-ONEs shows that hybrid translation, ie. combination of NMT+human post-editing+human QA, is ideal for Travel and Tourism content.

The latest upgraded survey compares the five NMT engines – Amazon Translate, Bing Microsoft Translator, DeepL Translator, Google Translate and Systran. ONEs' assessment was conducted by 500 human evaluators checking a total of 25,000 strings in five language pairs: English to French; English to Spanish; English to Arabic; English to German and English to Portuguese.  

The results found that Amazon's NMT engine performed the best in three out of the five pairs, DeepL in one and DeepL and Google tied for the best in one.

OHT has recruited, trained and tested thousands of linguists, and has a track record of well over one million NMT rating and test projects, in over 50 languages for its customers. According to the company, the standard computer-based evaluation programs like BLEU, METEOR and TER are fast, easy and inexpensive to run, but their results are not good enough for any business use of NMT engines. Business customers need human based quality score in order to know if hybrid translation (NMT+human post-editing+human QA) is right for them.

"In view of the positive feedback we will continue to expand ONEs and the next version will cover more languages, additional categories, and new NMT engines," says Shoshan. "We are already working with few of the top NMT engine vendors in order to assist them with improving their translation quality," added Shoshan. "Having great NMT engines is in the interest of all of our business customers," concluded Shoshan.

OHT is already using ONEs in real time to offer the world's first fully hybrid online translation service that combines NMT and human post-editing. The company uses ONEs to choose the best NMT engine for any given material, and then decides in real time who is going to do the post-editing and how many reviewers are going to check and approve the final results. To provide customers with the best translation solution, OHT is working with some of the biggest names in the business: Amazon Translate, Google Translate, DeepL, Bing Translator and other NMT engines, thus optimizing quality, speed and cost for each and every project.

OHT continues to measure NMT engines' quality in different fields and languages on a regular quarterly basis.

For more information you are invited to visit: https://www.onehourtranslation.com/translation/enterprise/nmt-score.

About One Hour Translation
One Hour Translation, the world's largest online translation agency, provides high-quality professional human translation of 98 languages and over 3000 language pairs. The company is providing high-quality translations around the clock, any day, any time, thanks to a community of over 25,000 Professional Translators from over 100 different countries.

One Hour Translation is a leader in Hybrid translations for enterprise customers: combining Neural Machine Translation (NMT) with human post-editing and human quality control. One Hour Translation specializes in providing business translations on a large scale in different fields including legal, technical, websites, applications and software, marketing and more.

One Hour Translation serves more than 60% of the Fortune 500 listed companies, including Coca Cola, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, HP, Xerox, Shell, Deloitte, HSBC, Procter & Gamble, IKEA, 3M, McCann, Alliance and many others.

For more details:
The company website: https://www.onehourtranslation.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OHT
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OneHourTranslation

Contacts: Alon Mlievski or Meirovitch Public Relations.

SOURCE One Hour Translation (OHT)