Is machine translation post-editing worth the effort? A survey of research into post-editing and effort
Maarit Koponen
University of Helsinki
ABSTRACT
Advances in the field of machine translation have recently generated new interest in the use of this technology in various scenarios. This development raises questions over the roles of humans and machines as machine translation appears to be moving from the peripheries of the translation field closer to the centre. The situation which influences the work of professional translators most involves post-editing machine translation, i.e. the use of machine translations as raw versions to be edited by translators. Such practice is increasingly commonplace for many language pairs and domains and is likely to form an even larger part of the work of translators in the future. While recent studies indicate that post-editing high-quality machine translations can indeed increase productivity in terms of translation speed, editing poor machine translations can be an unproductive task. The question of effort involved in post-editing therefore remains a central issue. The objective of this article is to present an overview of the use of post-editing of machine translation as an increasingly central practice in the translation field. Based on a literature review, the article presents a view of current knowledge concerning post-editing productivity and effort. Findings related to specific source text features, as well as machine translation errors that appear to be connected with increased post-editing effort, are also discussed.
KEYWORDS
Machine translation, MT quality, MT post-editing, post-editing effort, productivity.