A human evaluation of English-Irish statistical and neural machine translation

With official status in both Ireland and the EU, there is a need for high-quality English-Irish (EN-GA) machine translation (MT) systems which are suitable for use in a professional translation environment. While we have seen recent research on improving both statistical MT and neural MT for the EN-GA pair, the results of such systems have always been reported using automatic evaluation metrics. This paper provides the first human evaluation study of EN-GA MT using professional translators and in-domain (public administration) data for a more accurate depiction of the translation quality available via MT.