Postediting machine translation output and its revision: subject-matter experts versus professional translators

El presente estudio compara la post-edición de textos técnicos de ingenieros y traductores profesionales en términos de velocidad, documentación y cambios. También se compara la calidad de los textos post-editados. Además, se explora cuál de los siguientes flujos de trabajo es más rápido y produce resultados de mayor calidad: la post-edición de los resultados de Traducción Automática hecha por los ingenieros y la revisada por traductores profesionales, o viceversa. Los resultados sugieren que la experiencia y conocimientos en la materia son los principales factores que determinan la calidad de la post-edición. Cuando se penalizan los errores recurrentes, la post-edición de textos técnicos realizada por los ingenieros es significativamente de mayor calidad que la de los traductores. La velocidad de revisión de traductores e ingenieros no difirió significativamente. En textos técnicos, la mejora de la calidad que conlleva que el ingeniero revise la post-edición del traductor es mayor que en cuando el trabajo se organiza al revés. Además, la calidad de los textos post-editados y sus versiones revisadas (ya sea realizada por traductores profesionales o ingenieros) cambia significativamente según se penalicen o no los errores recurrentes.El present estudi compara la post-edició de textos tècnics d'enginyers i traductors professionals en termes de velocitat, documentació i canvis. També es compara la qualitat dels textos post-editats. A més, s'explora quin dels següents fluxos de treball és més ràpid i produeix resultats de major qualitat: la post-edició dels resultats de Traducció Automàtica feta pels enginyers i la revisada per traductors professionals, o viceversa. Els resultats suggereixen que l'experiència i coneixements en la matèria són els principals factors que determinen la qualitat de la post-edició. Quan es penalitzen els errors recurrents, la post-edició de textos tècnics realitzada pels enginyers és significativament de major qualitat que la dels traductors. La velocitat de revisió de traductors i enginyers no va diferir significativament. En textos tècnics, la millora de la qualitat que comporta que l'enginyer revisi la post-edició del traductor és major que en quan el treball s'organitza a l'inrevés. A més, la qualitat dels textos post-editats i les seves versions revisades (ja sigui realitzada per traductors professionals o enginyers) canvia significativament segons es penalitzin o no els errors recurrents.The present research compares engineers’ and professional translators’ postediting a technical text in terms of speed, documentation and changes. It also compares the postedited texts with regard to quality. Further, we explore which of the following workflows is faster and produces outputs of higher quality: Postediting MT output by engineers and revising the postedited text by professional translators, or vice-versa. The findings suggest that expertise and experience in the subject-matter are the main factors determining postediting quality. When the recurrent errors are penalized, the engineers’ postediting of technical texts is of significantly higher quality than the translators’. The translators’ and the engineers’ postediting and revision speed did not differ significantly. For technical texts, the quality improvement brought about by engineer-revision of translator-postediting is higher than vice-versa. Further, the quality of the postedited texts and their revised versions (either performed by professional translators or engineers) changes significantly as a result of penalizing and unpenalizing recurrent errors

JTEC panel report on machine translation in Japan

The goal of this report is to provide an overview of the state of the art of machine translation (MT) in Japan and to provide a comparison between Japanese and Western technology in this area. The term 'machine translation' as used here, includes both the science and technology required for automating the translation of text from one human language to another. Machine translation is viewed in Japan as an important strategic technology that is expected to play a key role in Japan's increasing participation in the world economy. MT is seen in Japan as important both for assimilating information into Japanese as well as for disseminating Japanese information throughout the world. Most of the MT systems now available in Japan are transfer-based systems. The majority of them exploit a case-frame representation of the source text as the basis of the transfer process. There is a gradual movement toward the use of deeper semantic representations, and some groups are beginning to look at interlingua-based systems

Translators and machine translation : book of presentations

El Tradumàtica Research Group està format, entre d'altres, per: Olga Torres-Hostench, Adrià Martín-Mor, Pilar Cid-Leal, Ramon Piqué Huerta, Anna Aguilar-Amat, Marisa Presas, Pilar Sánchez-Gijón, Inna Kozlov

Post-editing machine translation as an FSL exercise

This is the second half of a study on the advisability of having undergraduates perform an exercise in post-editing (PE) on output from machine translation (MT). After a sketch of its chequered history, I take up the various ways in which students could be introduced to MT, and conclude that PE is the most useful, mainly because it makes them aware of MT’s limitations and fundamental language properties underlying these limitations. Through a review of the literature on PE practices and challenges, especially a psycho-linguistic study by Krings (2001), I highlight crucial differences between professional PE and our pedagogical experiment. An error analysis of the student PE results (English to French) is then compared with analyses of the MT input, student translations of the same text from scratch, and parallel results from the initial, Frenchto- English experiment. Finally, student comments on the exercise suggest that weaker students especially find it beneficial.Este artículo (que continúa la investigación previa) examina la utilidad de la traducción automática (TA) en la post-edición (PE) de textos de los avanzados estudiantes anglófonos de licenciatura en francés. Tras un esbozo de la turbulenta historia de la TA, echamos una mirada a las varias maneras de presentarla a una clase de traducción y concluimos que la PE es de lejos el método más útil, sobre todo por la concienciación que impone de los límites de la TA y de las propiedades fundamentales del lenguaje que subyacen a éstos. Por medio de un breve estudio de escritos relativos a las prácticas y a los desafíos de la PE, y gracias especialmente a un estudio psicolingüístico de Krings (2001), señalamos las principales diferencias entre la PE profesional y el resultado de nuestro experimento pedagógico. Un análisis de los errores estudiantiles en un ejercicio de PE (del inglés al francés) se compara con el ejercicio análogo de la fase inicial (del francés al inglés), luego con los resultados en pura TA, sin PE, del mismo texto, y finalmente con las traducciones de estudiantes hechas sin TA. Para terminar, los comentarios estudiantiles sobre el ejercicio nos llevan a creer que éste beneficia sobre todo a los estudiantes flojos

Post-editing machine translated text in a commercial setting: Observation and statistical analysis

Machine translation systems, when they are used in a commercial context for publishing purposes, are usually used in combination with human post-editing. Thus understanding human post-editing behaviour is crucial in order to maximise the benefit of machine translation systems. Though there have been a number of studies carried out on human post-editing to date, there is a lack of large-scale studies on post-editing in industrial contexts which focus on the activity in real-life settings. This study observes professional Japanese post-editors’ work and examines the effect of the amount of editing made during post-editing, source text characteristics, and post-editing behaviour, on the amount of post-editing effort. A mixed method approach was employed to both quantitatively and qualitatively analyse the data and gain detailed insights into the post-editing activity from various view points. The results indicate that a number of factors, such as sentence structure, document component types, use of product specific terms, and post-editing patterns and behaviour, have effect on the amount of post-editing effort in an intertwined manner. The findings will contribute to a better utilisation of machine translation systems in the industry as well as the development of the skills and strategies of post-editors

Rapid and Radical Changes in Translation and Translation Studies

This article describes the changes in the field of translation by referring to practices such as localization, amateur translation, audiovisual translation, and news translation. The changes are enhanced by computing, information, and communication technologies. Therefore, two paradigms are evolving, and they justify, to some degree, the current multiplication of labels created for translation. On one hand, the paradigm of equivalence has been replaced by the paradigm of the cultural turn. And the shift exists concurrently with the change of the platforms and media through which all the activities of translation are carried out&mdash;from the printed book paradigm to the digital paradigm.</p

Productivity and quality in the post-editing of outputs from translation memories and machine translation

This study presents empirical research on no-match, machine-translated and translation-memory segments, analyzed in terms of translators’ productivity, final quality and prior professional experience. The findings suggest that translators have higher productivity and quality when using machine-translated output than when translating on their own, and that the productivity and quality gained with machine translation are not significantly different from the values obtained when processing fuzzy matches from a translation memory in the 85-94 percent range. The translators’ prior experience impacts on the quality they deliver but not on their productivity. These quantitative findings are triangulatedwith qualitative data from an online questionnaire and from one-to-one debriefings with the translators. Este estudio presenta una investigación empírica sobre la traducción de segmentos nuevos y aquellos procesados con traducción automática y memorias de traducción analizados en relación a la productividad, calidad final y experiencia profesional de un grupo de traductores. Los resultados sugieren que los traductores obtienen una productividad y calidad más altas cuando procesan segmentos de traducción automática que cuando traducen sin ninguna ayuda y que dicha productividad y calidad no son significativamente diferentes a la que se obtiene cuando procesan coincidencias parciales de una memoria de traducción (del 85 al 94 por ciento). La experiencia profesional previa de los traductores influye en la calidad pero no así en la productividad obtenidas. Los resultados cuantitativos se triangulan, además, con datos cualitativos obtenidos a través de un cuestionario en línea y de entrevistas individuales realizadas a los tra

Applications in Electronics Pervading Industry, Environment and Society

This book features the manuscripts accepted for the Special Issue “Applications in Electronics Pervading Industry, Environment and Society—Sensing Systems and Pervasive Intelligence” of the MDPI journal Sensors. Most of the papers come from a selection of the best papers of the 2019 edition of the “Applications in Electronics Pervading Industry, Environment and Society” (APPLEPIES) Conference, which was held in November 2019. All these papers have been significantly enhanced with novel experimental results. The papers give an overview of the trends in research and development activities concerning the pervasive application of electronics in industry, the environment, and society. The focus of these papers is on cyber physical systems (CPS), with research proposals for new sensor acquisition and ADC (analog to digital converter) methods, high-speed communication systems, cybersecurity, big data management, and data processing including emerging machine learning techniques. Physical implementation aspects are discussed as well as the trade-off found between functional performance and hardware/system costs

Problem solving activities in post-editing and translation from scratch: A multi-method study

Companies and organisations are increasingly using machine translation to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and then edit the machine translated output to create a fluent text that adheres to given text conventions. This procedure is known as post-editing. Translation and post-editing can often be categorised as problem-solving activities. When the translation of a source text unit is not immediately obvious to the translator, or in other words, if there is a hurdle between the source item and the target item, the translation process can be considered problematic. Conversely, if there is no hurdle between the source and target texts, the translation process can be considered a task-solving activity and not a problem-solving activity. This study investigates whether machine translated output influences problem-solving effort in internet research, syntax, and other problem indicators and whether the effort can be linked to expertise. A total of 24 translators (twelve professionals and twelve semi-professionals) produced translations from scratch from English into German, and (monolingually) post-edited machine translation output for this study. The study is part of the CRITT TPR-DB database. The translation and (monolingual) post-editing sessions were recorded with an eye-tracker and a keylogging program. The participants were all given the same six texts (two texts per task). Different approaches were used to identify problematic translation units. First, internet research behaviour was considered as research is a distinct indicator of problematic translation units. Then, the focus was placed on syntactical structures in the MT output that do not adhere to the rules of the target language, as I assumed that they would cause problems in the (monolingual) post-editing tasks that would not occur in the translation from scratch task. Finally, problem indicators were identified via different parameters like Munit, which indicates how often the participants created and modified one translation unit, or the inefficiency (InEff) value of translation units, i.e. the number of produced and deleted tokens divided by the final length of the translation. Finally, the study highlights how these parameters can be used to identify problems in the translation process data using mere keylogging data