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Pre-ordering of phrase-based machine translation input in translation workflow

Word reordering is a difficult task for decoders when the languages involved have a significant difference in syntax. Phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT), preferred in commercial settings due to its maturity, is particularly prone to errors in long range reordering. Source sentence pre-ordering, as a pre-processing step before PBSMT, proved to be an efficient solution that can be achieved using limited resources. We propose a dependency-based pre-ordering model with parameters optimized using a reordering score to pre-order the source sentence. The source sentence is then translated using an existing phrase-based system. The proposed solution is very simple to implement. It uses a hierarchical phrase-based statistical machine translation system (HPBSMT) for pre-ordering, combined with a PBSMT system for the actual translation. We show that the system can provide alternate translations of less post-editing effort in a translation workflow with German as the source language.