The ACCEPT Academic Portal: A Pre-editing and Post-editing Teaching Platform

The advance of machine translation in the last years is placing new demands on professional translators. This entails new requirements on translation educational curricula at the university level and exacerbates the need for dedicated software for teaching students how to leverage the technologies involved in a machine translation workflow. In this chapter, we introduce the ACCEPT Academic Portal, a user centred online platform which implements the complete machine translation (MT) workflow and is specifically designed for teaching purposes. Its ultimate objective is to increase the understanding of pre-editing, post-editing and evaluation of machine translation. The platform, publicly available at http://accept-portal.unige.ch/academic, is built around four main modules, namely, the Pre-editing, Machine Translation, Post-editing, and Evaluation module. The Pre-editing module provides checking resources to verify the compliance of the input text with automatic and interactive pre-editing rules, based on a shallow analysis of the text. The Translation module translates the raw and preedited versions of the input text using a statistical MT system, and highlights the differences between the two translations for easy identification of the impact of pre-editing on translation. The Post editing module allows users to improve translations by postediting the output text freely, manually or with the help of interactive and automatic post-editing rules. Finally, the Evaluation module provides support for eliciting user feedback. At the end of the workflow, a summary and statistics on the whole process are made available to users, for reference purposes. The ACCEPT Academic Portal was developed in the framework of the ACCEPT European project and, to the best of our knowledge, it is the only online environment integrating advanced pre-editing and post-editing technology into a complete MT workflow. Through its simple and userfriendly interface, as well as its pedagogically motivated functionalities that enable experimentation, visual comparison and documentation, the ACCEPT Academic Portal is a unique tool allowing to study the interactions between MT-related processes and to assess the contribution of new technologies to translation