The main characteristics of a translation task according to the FEMTI report

The Framework for Machine Translation Evaluation in ISLE is a resource that helps MT evaluators define contextual evaluation plans.

FEMTI is made of two interrelated classifications. The first one is used for what the user needs and the second concerns quality characteristics of MT systems which are potentially of interest, along with the metrics that were proposed to measure them.

The characteristics of the translation task are:

• Assimilation: “the ultimate purpose of the assimilation task (of which translation forms a part) is to monitor a (relatively) large volume of texts produced by people outside the organization, in (usually) several languages”.
• Dissemination: “the ultimate purpose of dissemination is to deliver to others a translation of documents produced inside the organization”.
• Communication: “the ultimate purpose of the communication task is to support multi-turn dialogues between people who speak different languages. The translation quality must be high enough for painless conversation, despite possible syntactically ill-formed input and idiosyncratic word and format usage”.

Sources:

The Framework for Machine Translation Evaluation in ISLE, Retrieved April 15, 2008 from http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mteval/