The ACCEPT academic portal : a user-centred online platform for pre-editing and post-editing

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 paper, we introduce the ACCEPT Academic Portal, a user-centred online platform which implements a complete machine translation 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 is built around three main modules, the Pre-editing, Translation and Post-editing modules, and currently supports three language combinations: French > English, English > French and English > German. The pre-editing module provides checking resources to verify the compliance of the input data with automatic and interactive pre-editing rules. The translation module translates the raw and pre-edited version of the input text using a phrase-based Moses 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 freely post-editing the text with the help of interactive and automatic rules. Finally, at the end of the workflow, a summary and statistics on the whole process are made available to users for evaluation and description purposes. Through its simple and user-friendly interface, as well as its pedagogically-motivated functionalities that enable experimentation, visual comparison, and documentation, this academic platform provides a unique tool to study the interactions between processes, and to assess the contribution of new technologies to translation