Source or target first? Comparison of two post-editing strategies with translation students

Abstract

We conducted an experiment with translation students to assess the influence of two different post-editing (PE) strategies (reading the source segment or the target segment first) on three aspects: PE time, ratio of corrected errors and number of optional modifications per word. Our results showed that the strategy that is adopted has no influence on the PE time or ratio of corrected errors. However, it does have an influence on the number of optional modifications per word. Two other thought-provoking observations emerged from this study: first, the ratio of corrected errors showed that, on average, students correct only half of the MT errors, which underlines the need for PE practice. Second, the time logs of the experiment showed that when students are not forced to read the source segment first, they tend to neglect the source segment and almost do monolingual PE. This experiment provides new insight relevant to PE teaching as well as the designing of PE environments.

Are post-editese features really universal?

“…The hypotheses put forward by [4,3] are in line with the work of [11], but were not confirmed by all datasets. Similar hypotheses were also advanced by [13], with results confirming the conclusion drawn by [11] with regard to lexical richness and density, but not sentence length.…”

“…[7] was unable to prove the existence of post-editese, whether based on human judgement or on automatic classification. On the other hand, [3,4,11,13] have observed certain significant differences between HT and PEMT. In [11], the investigated PEMT corpora exhibit lower lexical richness and lexical density than their HT counterparts, as well as a sentence length that is closer to the source (with the exception of one corpus).…”

“…In recent years, numerous studies have attempted to analyse the characteristics of PEMT in comparison with human translations (HT), employing various methodologies and focusing on different phenomena, such as cognate translations or terminological variations [14], frequency of certain words or phrases [10], and variation of translation solutions [9] (a more detailed description of these studies and their primary results can be found in [13]). While these studies have yielded promising results in terms of developing our understanding of post-edited language, it remains difficult to generalise on the characteristics of post-edited texts, due the variety of study designs and features under investigation.…”

“…In 2017, [7] put forward the notion of post-editese and defined it as "the expected unique characteristics of a post-edited text that set it apart from a [human] translated text". Following this work, several researchers took part in the quest to identify the universal features of post-edited texts (see [3,4,11,13]).…”

On Pedagogic Uses of Literary Machine Translation: A Case Study Based on the Language Pair English – Italian

“…The same awareness, however, could lead to more effective revision or post-editing. A study conducted by Volkart et al (2022), showed that students corrected only about 50% of the errors present in the MT output, which may partly depend on the fact that, unless forced to, they tended to ignore the source text and carry out a predominantly monolingual post-editing. Considering that NMT has increased the number of hardly detectable errors, it would be important for students to know what to look for when post-editing so as not to be mislead by fluent readability.…”