M3TRA: integrating TM and MT for professional translators

Translation memories (TM) and machine translation (MT) both are potentially useful resources for professional translators, but they are often still used independently in translation workflows. As translators tend to have a higher confidence in fuzzy matches than in MT, we investigate how to combine the benefits of TM retrieval with those of MT, by integrating the results of both. We develop a flexible TM-MT integration approach based on various techniques combining the use of TM and MT, such as fuzzy repair, span pretranslation and exploiting multiple matches. Results for ten language pairs using the DGT-TM dataset indicate almost consistently better BLEU, METEOR and TER scores compared to the MT, TM and NMT baselines.This research was done in the context of the SCATE project, funded by the Flemish Agency for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (IWT project 13007)