Name Translation as a Machine Translation Evaluation Task

Name translation has proven to be a challenge for machine translation providers, but breakthroughs in related natural language processing technologies may make rapid progress possible in this area. In this paper, we describe the challenges in name translation, which takes on greater importance when viewing machine translation as an embedded component of a translingual process. To show a baseline measurement for this aspect, we then describe a procedure for name translation evaluation, along with preliminary results from an experiment to determine the feasibility of automated evaluation of name translation.