Episodes

As anyone who's encountered a badly translated text could tell you, not all translations are created equal. Some translations are smooth, fluent and sound like a poet wrote them; some are jerky, non-grammatical and awkward. When a machine is doing the translating, it's awfully easy to end up with a robotic-sounding text; as the state of the art in machine translation improves, though, a natural question to ask is: according to what measure? How do we quantify a "good" translation? Enter the BLEU score, which is the standard metric for quantifying the quality of a machine translation.