Machine translated texts are increasingly used for quickly obtaining an idea of the content of a text and as a basis for editing the text for publication. This paper presents a study examining how well a machine-translated text can convey the intended meaning to the reader.

In the experiment described, test subjects edited machine-translated texts from English into Finnish. In order to observe how well it would be possible for the test subjects to decipher the meaning of the source text based on the machine translation alone, they had no access to the source text. Their edits were assessed by the authors of the paper for the correctness of meaning (compared to the source text) and language (compared to the target language norms and conventions). The results show that the test subjects were successful at deducing the correct meaning without the source text for about half of the edited sentences. The results also suggest that errors in word forms and mangled relations that can be deduced based on context are the kind of machine translation errors that are easier to recover from, while mistranslated idioms and missing content seem to be more critical to understand the meaning.