Effect Of Translation Expertise On Post-editing Productivity And Quality

Machine translation has grown dramatically and transformed working patterns of most translators.High-quality translation entails post-editing(PE)activities in this new mode.Previous research has focused on various aspects of post-editing,such as affecting factors,productivity evaluation,quality measurement and PE tools.However,the relationship between translation expertise and post-editing is neglected.Research in this line is believed to be conducive to optimizing the cultivation of translation talents and preparing them better for new requirements.To probe into the effect of translation expertise on post-editing productivity and quality,the present study compared the performance of non-MTI students,student translators and professional translators in the face of the same post-editing task.Three indicators,Translation Edit Rate(TER),Manual Score,and Semantic Distance,were used to quantify technical efforts,cognitive efforts and post-editing quality.Analysis of Variance(ANOVA)and Spearman Correlation Analysis were conducted to examine the intergroup variances and intragroup correlations on the three indicators,followed by case study to verify the empirical results.The results firstly revealed significant effects of translation expertise on TER and manual score,as student translators tended to edit less and non-MTI students demanded more cognitive efforts.In the post-editing process,professional translators were inclined to retain the original sentence order of the MT text and to use insertion and deletion more.Secondly,trained translators were capable of identifying and correcting more errors and mistranslations in the MT text relative to non-MTI students.Finally,the quantitative results suggested a significantly positive correlation between TER and semantic distance.The case analysis showed that non-MTI students who edited more were more likely to produce unacceptable outputs due to invalid and even counterproductive edits.However,for professional translators,the more they edited,the better translation they might produce.Overall,the study concluded that translation expertise could have significant effects on post-editing productivity and quality.