MTtulosta

MTtulosta is a hypothetical file format and software suite used to store and manage machine-translated text along with metadata such as segment alignment, confidence scores, and edit history. The name combines MT, abbreviation for machine translation, and tulosta (print or output in Finnish), reflecting its intended use in documenting translation results for multilingual workflows.

In the imagined profile of MTtulosta, documents are organized into segments with mandatory source and translated text, plus optional metadata including language codes, timestamps, and authorship. The format is designed to support multi-language projects and to enable traceability from the original source to the final output.

The design emphasizes extensibility, with a text-based header and per-segment payload that can accommodate plain text, formatting tokens, and links to terminology databases or translation memories. MTtulosta is conceived as interoperable with existing localization tools, allowing conversion to and from established formats.

Reference implementations are described as MTtulosta Core libraries in several programming languages, offering utilities to read and write MTtulosta files, and to convert to formats such as XLIFF or JSON. Basic QA hooks, including consistency checks and post-editing annotations, are part of these tooling packages.

Scholarly and practitioner discussions present MTtulosta as a teaching and research tool to study post-editing workflows and auditing practices, rather than as a widely adopted standard. Critics point to fragility around interoperability and the challenges of establishing broad consensus for adoption.

As a notional concept, MTtulosta illustrates how machine-translated outputs could be richly annotated and audited, supporting governance, quality control, and reproducibility in translation projects.