A Report On The Quality Assessment Of English-Chinese Machine-translated Subtitles

Proliferation of subtitles in the era of media convergence,quality and efficiency of subtitling should be improved to further promote the circulation of video content in the world.The breakthrough of algorithms has been fueling the application expansion of machine translation,including in the area of subtitling.Several Chinese subtitling tools have been developed,including the web-based VideoLocalize,NeteaseSight and ysj,as well as client Video subtitling toolkit,YeeCaption.Translation quality of those subtitling agencies,however,has been questioned by some users,and there are few related pieces of researches on machine-translated subtitle quality.Therefore,this report aims to explore the quality of English to Chinese subtitles generated by machine.The machine translation experiment in this report is based on a real English-to-Chinese subtitling project which includes two videos focusing separately on design thinking and water resource.The total duration is 51 minutes and 46 seconds,and transcriptions about 10,000 words.VideoLocalize and NeteaseSight were carefully selected to carry out the experiment,and outputs of these two systems were compared to human subtitles.Then semiotic signs and linguistic dimension were then analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively,and explained in detail with mini cases.In addition,the results emerged that systems made a clear separation of transcription and translation,improvement can still be made in terms of convenience for users to go back and forth between transcription and translation,and how smooth it could be for users to comment and respond.This report shows that the artificial intelligence of the subtitling systems is not as smart as they are promoted in terms of producing high-quality subtitles independently.Nevertheless,interactive subtitling of machine translating and human proofreading contributes to speed up subtitling with quality being ensured.This reminds us that contribution made by machines in subtitling should not be overstated;while from the perspective of product output,we should appreciate how technology can promote the internationalization of content and culture by forcing human subtitlers to embrace and take full advantage of technologies to improve work efficiency.