An Empirical Study On The Usability Of Machine Translation Postediting: Evidence From Users’ Perception And Practicality

Globalization has brought sharp increase in the demand for translation and the quality of products from machine translation system has been greatly improved,which has made machine translation widely used in the language service industry as an effective way to cope with the global shortage of translators.Although technological advances have enabled machine translation systems to perform better natural language processing,the quality of raw machine translations has not yet reached the level equivalent to that of human translations.Therefore,post-editing,as a compensatory method,is used in translation practice along with machine translation.This paper tries to introduce the concept of usability into Translation Studies by focusing on the usability of machine translation post-editing.Usability is defined as the sum of usefulness and ease of use.By designing and carrying out an experiment,this study recruits student translators as participants,and comprehensively uses research methods such as eyetracking,key logging,questionnaire,and retrospective reports.Qualitative data and quantitative data are triangulated.This paper aims to investigate usability of machine translation postediting from both users’ perception and practicality aspects by addressing the following research questions:(1)What is the users’ perception of machine translation post-editing usability? Specifically,how do the users perceive the usefulness and ease of use of machine translation post-editing?(2)what’s the practicality of machine translation post-editing usability? Specifically,compared with from-scratch translation,what is the usefulness of machine translation post-editing measured by processing speed and translation quality in practice? What is the ease of use of machine translation post-editing measured by temporal,technical and cognitive effort in practice as indicated by the key logging and eye-tracking data?Sixty Chinese student translators completed the questionnaire on their perceptions of machine translation post-editing usability.Fifty of them later performed a post-editing task and a regular translation task to collect data about translation process and product.After analysis,it was found that:(1)For perceived usefulness,student translators generally held a positive attitude.They perceived machine translation post-editing to be useful in accelerating processing speed.However,they were skeptical about its use to improve final translation quality.They were neutral towards the ease of use of machine translation post-editing mainly because they believed it would restrict their creativity and bring extra load to interact with machine translation output.(2)compared with from-scratch translation,machine translation postediting’s usefulness in performance was remarkable: it increased student translators text processing speed and also improved their translation quality;its ease of use in performance was also partly proved in that it significantly reduced student translators’ effort as measured by(a)fixation duration and fixation counts;(b)total task time;and(c)the number of insertions and total keystrokes.This paper will provide a methodological reference for empirical research in related fields.The findings of this study will provide inspiration for translation teaching and translator training in terms of curriculum settings and teaching content.