The Riddle of (Literary) Machine Translation Quality

This study aims to gauge the reliability and validity of metrics and algorithms in evaluating the quality of machine translation in a literary context. Ten machine translated versions of a literary story, provided by four different MT engines over a period of three years, are compared applying two quantitative quality estimation scores (BLEU and a recently developed literariness algorithm). The comparative analysis provides an insight not only into the quality of stylistic and narratological features of machine translation, but also into more traditional quality criteria, such as accuracy and fluency. It is found that evaluations are not always in agreement and that they lack nuance. It is suggested that metrics and algorithms cover only parts of the notion of “quality”, and that a more fine-grained approach is needed if potential literary quality of machine translation is to be captured and possibly validated using those instruments.