Exploring undergraduate students’ experiences in dealing with post-editing of machine translation

Abstract

Although post-editing of machine translation (PEMT) has been much discussed and spoken among students in higher education institutions, little empirical evidence has been reported regarding the students’ real practices in their academic life. To fill this practical gap, this article explores the students’ experiences in dealing with PEMT in a Theoretical Foundation of Translating and Interpreting (TFTI) course. This exploration elaborates practical insights into how the students initially started practicing translation through PEMT in their actual day-to-day practices. Fifty-eight English students studying in an undergraduate program in a prominent public university in Indonesia voluntarily participated in this qualitative case study. Data were collected from students’ focused-group discussion (FGD), survey questionnaire, in-depth interviews, and students’ documents and the data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings showed that post-editing process provides the students with experiences in building their text knowledge to enable them to have high awareness and sensitivity to the academic texts. In addition, in PEMT practices, the students’ experiences were explored through the implementation of translation methods and techniques expected to build their awareness in PEMT with regard to language structure and language function. These experiences have given some empirical inputs for the lecturers to design relevant tasks and apply various translating practices for students’ more meaningful learning.

Becoming professional translators: Developing effective TAP course for undergraduate students

“…The finding of this research also indicates that the need for fast, accurate, and consistent translation motivates translators to use new technology in the translation process, such as CAT tools and MT. These findings support the previous findings that suggest the use of CAT tools and MT in the professional translation practice (Abraham-Barna & Abraham- Barna, 2016;Bloodgood & Strauss, 2014;Doherty, 2016;Harto et al, 2022;Istomina, 2020;Reinke, 2013;Ristikartano, 2015). This is confirmed by the results of the interviews that strongly suggest the inclusion of CAT tools and MT in the TAP course materials for their assistance in producing fast translation with a high level of consistency in the use of terminology.…”

Identifying MT Errors for Higher-Quality Target Language Writing

“…Post-editing 1 has received attention from a variety of perspectives. Researchers have identified the merits of post-editing (Alsalem, 2019;Escartín et al, 2017;Fredholm, 2019), explored the postediting process (Chung, 2020;Jia et al, 2019;Shin & Chon, 2023), along with user experiences of post-editing (Harto et al, 2022). They have also analysed how TL proficiency affects the post-editing process (Chung, 2020;Shin & Chon, 2023) and how the process of post-editing is different between native and non-native TL speakers (Báez, 2018;Sánchez-Gijón & Torres-Hostench, 2014).…”

“…Not only the learner's TL ability but also the genre of STs factors into the effectiveness of post-editing. When TL learners do not have sufficient knowledge on the specific genre/topic, understanding the ST content is difficult (Harto et al, 2022). Choosing accurate TL vocabulary along with the particular context of an unfamiliar genre/topic is not easy.…”

“…Users need to raise their awareness of MT errors (Funakoshi et al, 2004), however, it is not always easy for TL learners to detect and correct them (Escartín et al, 2017;Shin & Chon, 2023;Vidal, 2021), even for students with higher TL proficiency. Harto et al (2022), targeting Indonesian-English MT output, reported that the most significant problems students encountered in their MT post-editing (MTPE) practices are related to grammar and vocabulary. This difficulty is even greater for learners of lower TL ability (Klimova et al, 2022;Lee, 2022).…”

Analysis of Machine Translation Performance on Translating Informative Text from English into Indonesian

“…The undergraduate students from Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia (UPI) applied the post-editing process by machine translation (PEMT) which gives them opportunities to develop text literacy so that they can read academic works with a high level of awareness and sensitivity. Additionally, during PEMT exercises, the students were able to practice the use of translation strategies and procedures designed to increase their understanding of language structure and function (Harto, Hamied, Musthafa, & Setyarini, 2022).…”