Pre-task perceptions of MT influence quality and productivity: the importance of better translator-computer interactions and implications for training

Vicent Briva-Iglesias, Sharon O’Brien


Abstract
This paper presents a user study with 11 professional English-Spanish translators in the legal domain. We analysed whether negative or positive translators’ pre-task perceptions of machine translation (MT) being an aid or a threat had any relationship with final translation quality and productivity in a post-editing workflow. Pre-task perceptions of MT were collected in a questionnaire before translators conducted post-editing tasks and were then correlated with translation productivity and translation quality after an Adequacy-Fluency evaluation. Each participant translated 13 texts over two consecutive weeks, accounting for 120,102 words in total. Results show that translators who had higher levels of trust in MT and thought that MT was not a threat to the translation profession reported higher translation quality and productivity. These results have critical implications: improving translator-computer interactions and fostering MT literacy in translation training may be crucial to reducing negative translators’ pre-task perceptions, resulting in better translation productivity and quality, especially adequacy.
Anthology ID:
2024.eamt-1.37
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:
444–454
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eamt-1.37
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vicent Briva-Iglesias and Sharon O’Brien. 2024. Pre-task perceptions of MT influence quality and productivity: the importance of better translator-computer interactions and implications for training. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1), pages 444–454, Sheffield, UK. European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT).
Cite (Informal):
Pre-task perceptions of MT influence quality and productivity: the importance of better translator-computer interactions and implications for training (Briva-Iglesias & O’Brien, EAMT 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eamt-1.37.pdf