Opportunities for Human-centered Evaluation of Machine Translation Systems

Machine translation models are embedded in larger user-facing systems. Although model evaluation has matured, evaluation at the systems level is still lacking. We review literature from both the translation studies and HCI communities about who uses machine translation and for what purposes. We emphasize an important difference in evaluating machine translation models versus the physical and cultural systems in which they are embedded. We then propose opportunities for improved measurement of user-facing translation systems. We pay particular attention to the need for design and evaluation to aid engendering trust and enhancing user agency in future machine translation systems.