Can Text Simplification Help Machine Translation?

This article explores the use of text simplification as a pre-processing step for statistical machine translation of grammatically complex under-resourced languages. Our experiments on English-to-Serbian translation show that this approach can improve grammaticality (fluency) of the translation output and reduce technical post-editing effort (number of post-edit operations). Furthermore, the use of more aggressive text simplification methods (which do not only simplify the given sentence but also discard irrelevant information thus producing syntactically very simple sentences) also improves meaning preservation (adequacy) of the translation output.