At the AsLing [1] 43rd Translation and Computer Conference, which was held virtually on November 16-17-18/2021, the panel Unedited (raw) Machine Translation: Strengths and Limitations in Your Use Case’s discussion provided a variety of use cases and how raw MT would or would not be appropriate for each.
After identifying use cases where delivering raw MT to end users is appropriate and use cases where it is not, much of the discussion was about disclaimers, especially whether there should be a disclaimer on every webpage that uses raw MT output.
On an article published in Translatio, FIT’s quarterly newsletter, and authored by Prof. Alan Melby, he mentions an approach to help disseminate the concept of labels:
There is an ongoing discussion among the panelists regarding an idea that occurred to me after the panel had ended: what if FIT and some of its external partners, such as GALA, agreed to ask everyone who delivers raw MT output to end users (i.e., translation “consumers”) to explicitly label every document and webpage as MT (for raw machine translation) or HT (for human translation or post-edited machine translation)? The idea would be to treat those labels as a form of consumer protection, analogous to food labels such as GF (gluten free). So far, panelist Deneufbourg supports the idea.
Since that panel discussion at AsLing, translation labels have been standardized by ASTM F2575-23 and are also mentioned in ISO 11669. Click here to learn more.