Evaluation of Machine Translation Errors in English and Iraqi Arabic

Errors in machine translations of English-Iraqi Arabic dialogues were analyzed at two different points in the systems' development using HTER methods to identify errors and human annotations to refine TER annotations. Although the frequencies of errors in the more mature systems were lower, the proportions of error types exhibited little change. Results include high frequencies of pronoun errors in translations to English, high frequencies of subject person inflection in translations to Iraqi Arabic, similar frequencies of word order errors in both translation directions, and very low frequencies of polarity errors. The problems with many errors can be generalized as the need to insert lexemes not present in the source or vice versa, which includes errors in multi-word expressions. Discourse context will be required to resolve some problems with deictic elements like pronouns.