Machine Translation and post-editing

 

New technologies: machine translation

Machine translation (MT) has now become a commonly used tool found on the Internet to translate short texts.

Despite continuous advances in technology, texts generated by machine translation continue to require the intervention of human translators, especially when it comes to translations of texts with high-value content, such as contracts, medical research, advertising documents, balance sheets, etc.

The skilful use of machine translation can be, with no doubt, of great help to translate large texts for “internal use”, to understand the overall content of dozens or hundreds of pages in a very short time, e.g. to be able to grasp the subject matter of a tender, as long as the source text is provided in a format suitable for processing and that key concepts and data are verified by human translators.

 

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 MAIN CAUSES OF MT ERRORS

 

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New translation services: post-editing

Post-editing, PE for insiders, is a contextually accurate revision of the MT output.
The ISO 18587 standard, published in 2017, defines ‘the requirements for the complete process of manual post-editing of machine translation output and post-editors’ competences.
This ISO standard, which also informs on the necessity of text adaptation before its processing by machine translation, distinguishes between:

• light post-editing (the post-editor/translator makes minimal corrections only to clarify the sense of the source text, yet grammatical, stylistic errors, etc. remain).
• full post-editing (the post-editor/translator makes all necessary grammatical, stylistic and terminological changes)

 

What must be considered for the possible use of machine translation:

• Is the required language combination (source and target language) sufficiently supported by machine translation systems?

• Can linguistic automatisms be applied to the type of text or is it very jargony?

• Is the format of the text suitable for automatic processing or does it require recopying or 'manual insertion' (pre-editing)?

• Are you aware of the time and costs of pre-editing and post-editing?

• Who? > Who is in charge of pre-editing? > Who is in charge of post-editing? 

• > Who guarantees the use of industry-specific terminology, style guides, glossaries, and terminology established by your company? 

   

• Who takes responsibility for the accuracy and faithfulness of the translation and its correspondence with the original?

• Are you aware of the disadvantages of using free programmes?

• If you use a free online translation tool, the input text you wish to translate and the translated text become public knowledge and can be found by anyone in the world! Do you know what the advantages of using paid translation programmes are? If you use a paid programme, both the original text and the translated text are protected by confidentiality.

 

Would you like to find out how this technology can help you?
Trust the experts: turn to Interlinguae!