Post-editese in Literary Translations

Abstract

In the present study, we investigate the post-editese phenomenon, i.e., the unique features that set machine translated post-edited texts apart from human-translated texts. We use 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) 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 examine 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.

Current evidence of post-editese: differences between post-edited neural machine translation output and human translation revealed through human evaluation

“…Several researchers have reported the existence of features of post-edited machine translation output (MTPE) that distinguish it from human translated text (HT), defined as post-editese. By way of example, Castilho et al looked at literary texts Google-translated from English into Brazilian Portuguese and found evidence for post-editese in one of the two texts examined [1]; Volkart et al found that post-edited machine translation was not only lexically poorer than human translation, but also less dense and less varied in terms of translation solutions [12]; Toral found that MTPE was simpler and more normalized and had a higher degree of interference from the source language than HT [11]; and Castilho et al found evidence of post-editese features, especially in light post-edited texts and in certain domains [2]. By contrast, on the other hand, Daems et al found no proof of the existence of post-editese, either perceived or measurable [5].…”