Post-Editese in Literary Translations

Abstract

In the present study, we investigated the post-editese phenomenon, i.e., the unique features that set machine translated post-edited texts apart from human-translated texts. We used two literary texts, namely, the English children’s novel by Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (AW) and Paula Hawkins’ popular book The Girl on the Train (TGOTT). Both literary texts were Google translated from English into Brazilian Portuguese to investigate whether the post-editese features can be found on the surface of the post-edited (PE) texts. In addition, we examined how the features found in the PE texts differ from the features encountered in the human-translated (HT) and machine translation (MT) versions of the same source text. Results revealed evidence for post-editese for TGOTT only with PE versions being more similar to the MT output than to the HT texts.

Quality assessment of machine-translated post-edited subtitles: an analysis of Brazilian translators’ perceptions

“…A small number of the participants reported negatively about some aspects, such as the lack of accuracy, the use of literal translation, and unnatural subtitles. We believe that this feedback might be explained in part by the PE proximity to the MT output, which may have resulted in the distortion of the writers' style and have influenced the final product, as reported by Castilho and Resende (2022). In addition, the MTPE subtitles might have contained those problems as a result of the post-editor's and proofreader's lack of experience and formal training in this field.…”

“…Furthermore, the perception of literal translation could also be explained by the priming effect of the raw MT output on the post-editor's lexical and syntactic choices. In a study conducted on the PE of literary texts, Castilho and Resende (2022) found out that the PE proximity to the MT output may result in the writers' style being distorted and the final product being influenced. In addition to that, an investigation conducted by Toral (2019) about the manifestation of translationese and post-editese found that post-edited texts tend to be simpler and have a higher degree of interference from the source language when compared to human translation.…”

Análisis cuantitativo de traducciones del inglés al español poseditadas por traductores institucionales

“…Es decir, condicionan su decisión de traducir de una forma u otra y provocan en última instancia que la variedad léxica de las posediciones sea menor que la de las traducciones humanas. En otras palabras, estos datos refuerzan la idea de que el uso de la traducción automática deja una huella en la traducción final (Toral, 2019;Castilho y Resende, 2022).…”

A review of existing Machine Translation Approaches, their Challenges and Evaluation Metrics

“…This is because neural networks need a lot of data to learn the patterns in Language. The neural method has resulted in more significant improvements in MT quality [44].…”