Sampling Guidelines

The assessment of translation quality has received much attention in the academic and professional sphere. There are a number of strategies that are used when performing translation quality evaluation (QE). Though human evaluation remains a valuable method for assessing translation quality, it can be time-consuming and expensive. A recent model to obtain quicker and cheaper human evaluations is by means of sampling.

Some examples of how to systematically create meaningful samples are the following:

• Exclude segments that are too short or too long either based on constant values or pre-calculated averages.
• Exclude repetitions or segments containing x % overlap with previous segments.
• Include segments that are knowledge rich i.e. containing terms or keywords (of the client).
• Exclude segments containing only numbers.
• Exclude segments containing only named entities.
• Include segments where target is x % longer/shorter than source.