Post-editors as Gatekeepers of Lexical and Syntactic Diversity: Comparative Analysis of Human Translation and Post-editing in Professional Settings

Lise Volkart, Pierrette Bouillon


Abstract
This paper presents a comparative analysis between human translation (HT) and post-edited machine translation (PEMT) from a lexical and syntactic perspective to verify whether the tendency of neural machine translation (NMT) systems to produce lexically and syntactically poorer translations shines through after post-editing (PE). The analysis focuses on three datasets collected in professional contexts containing translations from English into French and German into French. Through a comparison of word translation entropy (HTRa) scores, we observe a lower degree of lexical diversity in PEMT compared to HT. Additionally, metrics of syntactic equivalence indicate that PEMT is more likely to mirror the syntactic structure of the source text in contrast to HT. By incorporating raw machine translation (MT) output into our analysis, we underline the important role post-editors play in adding lexical and syntactic diversity to MT output. Our findings provide relevant input for MT users and decision-makers in language services as well as for MT and PE trainers and advisers.
Anthology ID:
2024.eamt-1.33
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Sheffield, UK
Editors:
Carolina Scarton, Charlotte Prescott, Chris Bayliss, Chris Oakley, Joanna Wright, Stuart Wrigley, Xingyi Song, Edward Gow-Smith, Rachel Bawden, Víctor M Sánchez-Cartagena, Patrick Cadwell, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Vera Cabarrão, Konstantinos Chatzitheodorou, Mary Nurminen, Diptesh Kanojia, Helena Moniz
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT)
Note:
Pages:
387–395
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eamt-1.33
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lise Volkart and Pierrette Bouillon. 2024. Post-editors as Gatekeepers of Lexical and Syntactic Diversity: Comparative Analysis of Human Translation and Post-editing in Professional Settings. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1), pages 387–395, Sheffield, UK. European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT).
Cite (Informal):
Post-editors as Gatekeepers of Lexical and Syntactic Diversity: Comparative Analysis of Human Translation and Post-editing in Professional Settings (Volkart & Bouillon, EAMT 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eamt-1.33.pdf