Quality expectations of machine translation

Abstract: Machine Translation (MT) is being deployed for a range of use-cases by millions of people on a daily basis. There should, therefore, be no doubt as to the utility of MT. However, not everyone is convinced that MT can be useful, especially as a productivity enhancer for human translators. In this chapter, I address this issue, describing how MT is currently deployed, how its output is evaluated and how this could be enhanced, especially as MT quality itself improves. Central to these issues is the acceptance that there is no longer a single 'gold standard' measure of quality, such that the situation in which MT is deployed needs to be borne in mind, especially with respect to the expected 'shelf-life' of the translation itself.