WASHINGTON - The global travel and tourism industry is expected to be the first sector to dispense with human-only translations, according to Ofer Shoshan, CEO of One Hour Translation (OHT), the world's largest online translation agency and a leader in Hybrid translations. OHT was the first to offer business customers Hybrid translation services, comprising of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and human post-editing and quality assurance.
"Within 6 to 12 months most of the travel and tourism industry, starting with the high-volume travel websites, will stop using traditional human-only translation services," predicts Shoshan.
Results from the One Hour Translation's "ONEs - OHT NMT Evaluation Score", a quarterly evaluation of NMT systems, show that the average machine translation quality score of typical travel and tourism material is above 90%.
The Q3 2018 ONEs shows that Neural Machine Translation of travel and tourism material from English to some of the most common target languages, namely French, Spanish, and German, produce high quality results. German scored highest at 5.78 on OHT's 6-point scale using DeepL, French followed with 5.48/6 using DeepL, Spanish with scoring 5.39/6 using Google Translate.
With above 90% translation quality score (ONEs) in the travel and tourism sector, the need for human post editors is reduced to a minimum. In effect, only minor fixes are required to bring the texts to 'human level' quality. Quality assurance after post-editing is done, also does not require a lot of work.
OHT is a major player in translations for the global travel and tourism industry, where the use of Hybrid translation has led to faster and cheaper translation, while maintaining high translation quality. One of the major sites that is known to have switched entirely to NMT technology is Booking.com, which uses "home-trained" NMT along with human post editors. "It is evident from close analysis of the results of our recent NMT evaluation score (ONEs), that the similarity between websites in the travel and tourism industry will accelerate the shift to Hybrid translation, i.e. NMT+ human post editing and human quality control, in that industry," says Shoshan.
One Hour Translation is at the forefront of the NMT-related changes, offering the first business-oriented Hybrid translation service on a large scale. To provide customers with the best product, OHT has partnered with the biggest NMT engine providers: Amazon Translate, Google Translate, DeepL, Bing Translator and other commercially available NMT engines.
OHT's ONEs will continue to measure and publish NMT engines performance in different fields and languages on a regular quarterly basis.
