MT post-editing into the mother tongue of into a foreign language? Spanish-to-English MT translation output post-edited by translation trainees

Pilar Sánchez-Gijón, Olga Torres-Hostench


Abstract
The aim of this study is to analyse whether translation trainees who are not native speakers of the target language are able to perform as well as those who are native speakers, and whether they achieve the expected quality in a “good enough” post-editing (PE) job. In particular the study focuses on the performance of two groups of students doing PE from Spanish into English: native English speakers and native Spanish speakers. A pilot study was set up to collect evidence to compare and contrast the two groups’ performances. Trainees from both groups had been given the same training in PE and were asked to post-edit 30 sentences translated from Spanish to English. The PE output was analyzed taking into account accuracy errors (mistranslations and omissions) as well as language errors (grammatical errors and syntax errors). The results show that some native Spanish speakers corrected just as many errors as the native English speakers. Furthermore, the Spanish-speaking trainees outperformed their English-speaking counterparts when identifying mistranslations and omissions. Moreover, the performances of the best English-speaking and Spanish-speaking trainees at identifying grammar and syntax errors were very similar.
Anthology ID:
2014.amta-wptp.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Month:
October 22-26
Year:
2014
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Sharon O'Brien, Michel Simard, Lucia Specia
Venue:
AMTA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Note:
Pages:
5–19
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2014.amta-wptp.1
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pilar Sánchez-Gijón and Olga Torres-Hostench. 2014. MT post-editing into the mother tongue of into a foreign language? Spanish-to-English MT translation output post-edited by translation trainees. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, pages 5–19, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
MT post-editing into the mother tongue of into a foreign language? Spanish-to-English MT translation output post-edited by translation trainees (Sánchez-Gijón & Torres-Hostench, AMTA 2014)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2014.amta-wptp.1.pdf