Abstract
We define "optimal reference translation" as a translation thought to be the best possible that can be achieved by a team of human translators. Optimal reference translations can be used in assessments of excellent machine translations.
We selected 50 documents (online news articles, with 579 paragraphs in total) from the 130 English documents included in the WMT2020 news test (http://www.statmt.org/wmt20/) with the aim to preserve diversity (style, genre etc.) of the selection. In addition to the official Czech reference translation provided by the WMT organizers (P1), we hired two additional translators (P2 and P3, native Czech speakers) via a professional translation agency, resulting in three independent translations. The main contribution of this dataset are two additional translations (i.e. optimal reference translations N1 and N2), done jointly by two translators-cum-theoreticians with an extreme care for various aspects of translation quality, while taking into account the translations P1-P3. We publish also internal comments (in Czech) for some of the segments.
Translation N1 should be closer to the English original (with regards to the meaning and linguistic structure) and female surnames use the Czech feminine suffix (e.g. "Mai" is translated as "Maiová"). Translation N2 is more free, trying to be more creative, idiomatic and entertaining for the readers and following the typical style used in Czech media, while still preserving the rules of functional equivalence. Translation N2 is missing for the segments where it was not deemed necessary to provide two alternative translations. For applications/analyses needing translation of all segments, this should be interpreted as if N2 is the same as N1 for a given segment.
We provide the dataset in two formats: OpenDocument spreadsheet (odt) and plain text (one file for each translation and the English original). Some words were highlighted using different colors during the creation of optimal reference translations; this highlighting and comments are present only in the odt format (some comments refer to row numbers in the odt file). Documents are separated by empty lines and each document starts with a special line containing the document name (e.g. "# upi.205735"), which allows alignment with the original WMT2020 news test. For the segments where N2 translations are missing in the odt format, the respective N1 segments are used instead in the plain-text format.