A Preliminary Attempt to Evaluate Machine Translations of Ukiyo-e Metadata Records

摘要

Providing multilingual metadata records for digital objects is a way expanding access to digital cultural collections. Recent advancements in deep learning techniques have made machine translation (MT) more accurate. Therefore, we evaluate the performance of three well-known MT systems (i.e., Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and DeepL Translator) in translating metadata records of ukiyo-e images from Japanese to English. We evaluate the quality of their translations with an automatic evaluation metric BLEU. The evaluation results show that DeepL Translator is better at translating ukiyo-e metadata records than Google Translate or Microsoft Translator, with Microsoft Translator performing the worst.