Evaluative Judgement in Teaching AI-based Translation: A Class-room Case Study of AI-Mediated Translation and Post-Editing

Gokhan Dogru


Abstract
Drawing on 23 student projects from a fourth-year Machine Translation and Post-editing course, this paper examines how asking students to compare LLM and NMT outputs, interpret metric results, and justify a post-editing choice reveals their evaluative judgement. Students translated short specialised English Wikipedia texts into Catalan or Spanish, generated four system outputs, evaluated them using automatic metrics and human adequacy/fluency assessment, selected one output for post-editing, and justified their decision in written reports. The analysis combines descriptive counts from 23 projects with qualitative coding of the 22 cases sup-ported by written reports. Results show that students did not treat automatic metrics as final authority: final post-editing selections often diverged from metric rankings and were justified through adequacy, fluency, terminology, and expected post-editing effort. The study therefore does not compare systems under benchmark conditions; it analyses how students justified system choice within an au-thentic classroom assignment.
Anthology ID:
2026.taitt-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Teaching AI-Based Translation and Technologies (TAITT 2026)
Month:
June
Year:
2026
Address:
Tilburg, the Netherlands
Editors:
Ralph Krüger, Dorothy Kenny, Sheila Castilho, Sergi Álvarez-Vidal, Nora Aranberri, María Isabel Rivas Ginel, Janiça Hackenbuchner
Venues:
TAITT | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
36–48
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.taitt-1.5/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gokhan Dogru. 2026. Evaluative Judgement in Teaching AI-based Translation: A Class-room Case Study of AI-Mediated Translation and Post-Editing. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Teaching AI-Based Translation and Technologies (TAITT 2026), pages 36–48, Tilburg, the Netherlands. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluative Judgement in Teaching AI-based Translation: A Class-room Case Study of AI-Mediated Translation and Post-Editing (Dogru, TAITT 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.taitt-1.5.pdf