  This paper elaborates on the design of a machine translation evaluation
method that aims to determine to what degree the meaning of an original text is
preserved in translation, without looking into the grammatical correctness of
its constituent sentences. The basic idea is to have a human evaluator take the
sentences of the translated text and, for each of these sentences, determine
the semantic relationship that exists between it and the sentence immediately
preceding it. In order to minimise evaluator dependence, relations between
sentences are expressed in terms of the conjuncts that can connect them, rather
than through explicit categories. For an n-sentence text this results in a list
of n-1 sentence-to-sentence relationships, which we call the text's
connectivity profile. This can then be compared to the connectivity profile of
the original text, and the degree of correspondence between the two would be a
measure for the quality of the translation.
  A set of "essential" conjuncts was extracted for English and Japanese, and a
computer interface was designed to support the task of inserting the most
fitting conjuncts between sentence pairs. With these in place, several sets of
experiments were performed.
