Lacking widely accepted and reliable evaluation measures, the evaluation of machine translation and translation tools is still an open issue. Commercial translation tools such as translation memories and translation workbenches are widely used and their developers claim usefulness in terms of productivity, consistency or quality. However, these claims are rarely proven using objective Comparative studies. In this collection we dissect the state of the art in translation technology and translation tool development and provide quantitative and qualitative answers to the question “how useful is translation technology?”.

Evaluation of translation technology requires a multifaceted approach. It involves the evaluation of the textual output quality in terms of intelligibility, accuracy, fidelity to its source text, and appropriateness of style and register. But it also takes into account the usability of supportive tools for creating and updating dictionaries, for post-editing texts, for controlling the source language, for customization of documents, for extendibility to new languages and for domain adaptability, etc. Finally, evaluation involves contrasting the costs and benefits of translation technology with those of human translation performance.

This special issue will be a combination of invited and contributed papers. Invited papers consist of position papers by top researchers or developers in the field and invited commentaries on these position papers. Contributed papers, the subject of this call for papers, describe ongoing efforts in developing and using machine translation technology and tools for translation support.
All contributions should focus on one of the three core themes given below.

Strict editing and the specific structure of the collection will guarantee that the collection transcends the sum of the papers in it and that the volume forms an integrated and coherent whole. Both invited and contributed papers will be peer-reviewed.

Preliminary contents

Evaluation in Translation Technology: Introduction (editors)

Part I:Translation Tools
-Invited position paper about translation tools by Angelika Zerfaß (ZAAC)
-Contributed and invited commentaries
-Accepted contributed papers

Part II: Machine Translation
-Invited position paper about Statistical MT by Andy Way (Dublin City University) & Mikel Forcada (University of Alicante)
-Invited position paper about Knowledge-Based MT by Jean Senellart (Systran)
-Contributed and invited commentaries
-Accepted contributed papers

Part III: Evaluation
-Invited position paper about meta-evaluation by Chris Callison-Burch (Johns Hopkins University)
-Contributed and invited commentaries
-Accepted contributed papers