Assessing the Quality of Some Machine Translation Systems Using an Information-Theoretic RS-Method

We are developing the information-theoretical method proposed by Ryabko and Savina (the RS-method) and applying it to several machine translation systems and four different languages belonging to different language families. The RS-method is based on an evaluation according to the following well-known fundamental principle: the better a translation preserves the author’s style, the better that translation is. (It should be noted that an author’s style is inherent to every writer and, in a sense, is as unique as a fingerprint. It is important to know that individual style is inherent not only to writers but also to ordinary people.) For our study, as an example, we selected texts by famous writers because their authorial writing style is most clearly expressed and obvious, but our research can be applied for any other texts. It turns out that the machine translation systems under consideration differ significantly, and some of them show quite good results within the framework of this approach.