Smarter edits? Post-editing with error highlights and translation suggestions

Fleur V.J. van Tellingen, Gautam Ranka, Dora Žugčić, Joyce van der Wal, Andrea Camasta, Livio Guerra, Alina Karakanta


Abstract
As MT quality increases, interest in enhanced post-editing features such as QE-derived error highlights is growing, yet evidence for their usefulness remains limited. In this work, we explore the usefulness of LLM-derived error highlights and correction suggestions based on automatic post-editing (APE). We conduct a study where professional translators (En-Nl) post-edit translations using APE error highlights and correction suggestions. While no condition yielded productivity or quality gains compared to regular PE, APE highlights were better received than QE-derived highlights, and correction suggestions improved overall user experience.
Anthology ID:
2026.eamt-1.41
Volume:
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)
Month:
June
Year:
2026
Address:
Tilburg, The Netherlands
Editors:
Dimitar Shterionov, Eva Vanmassenhove, Mirella De Sisto, Fred Blain, Javad Pourmostafa Roshan Sharami, Lisa Lepp, Chiara Manna, Argentina Anna Rescigno, Alina Karakanta, Ayla Rigouts Terryn, Manuel Lardelli, Natalia Resende, Elena Murgolo, Janiça Hackenbuchner, Anna Zaretskaya, Miquel Esplà-Gomis, Thierry Etchegoyhen, Dagmar Gromann, Rachel Bawden, Barry Haddow, Sara Szoc, Mikel Forcada, Helena Moniz
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
649–664
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.41/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fleur V.J. van Tellingen, Gautam Ranka, Dora Žugčić, Joyce van der Wal, Andrea Camasta, Livio Guerra, and Alina Karakanta. 2026. Smarter edits? Post-editing with error highlights and translation suggestions. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1), pages 649–664, Tilburg, The Netherlands. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
Smarter edits? Post-editing with error highlights and translation suggestions (van Tellingen et al., EAMT 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.41.pdf