[MT-List] Who should be doing MT post-editing?

[Jeff Allen]

Quoting posting to MT-list by lorena.guerra2@mail.dcu.ie 
> I would like to ask you, from your experience point of view:
> Who(do you think) should be doing Machine translation Post-editing?
> Should this activity be performed by (junior/senior) translators, revisers,
> non-linguistics, trained specialists...? Why?
> Regards,
> Lorena Guerra
> Postgraduate student at DCU- Ireland
> Information needed for my dissertation in Translation Technology


* Students:   Mention of students doing postediting either in their native 
language or not:

chap 17. Machine translation in the classroom 
     Harold Somers 
section 2.2 post-editing (p 322)
see http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=BTL_35

Also mentioned in an example in same chapter, section 4.2  Assessing MT for 
assimilation   (p 331)

The example shows an online translation of a web page and proposes the idea of 
an exercise to post-edit the page in target language without seeing the 
original source text or knowing the source language.  I usually discourage this.

* marketing and product specialists:   marketing product line and service 
specialists can do postediting

See:
ALLEN, Jeffrey. 2001. Postediting: an integrated part of a translation
software program. In Language International magazine, April 2001, pp. 26-29.


* Human Resources:   Training on MT postediting of some tech doc writers and 
Human Resources specialists took place today. The Human Resources people write 
up external company communication (ie job announcements) and company internal 
communication in at least 2 languages.

* Bilingual secretaries:   Last month a couple of bilingual secretaries were 
trained on use of MT software for multilingual documentation that they 
communicate to their groups and associations that partner with their 
association.

* levels of postediting:  The types of posteditors really depends on the type 
of postediting that is conducted (full, minimal, rapid)  as described in:

 chap 16. Post-editing 
     Jeffrey Allen    (pp 297-319)
see http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=BTL_35


I believe that Postediting can be taught to anyone (with bilingual skills) 
involved in the field of communication of information.

* Native tongue postediting or not?   Postediting into ones native tongue or 
not can be debated depending on the level of postediting that is assigned and 
the quality of the translation that is expected.

Most everything I have read about postediting has been from the perspective of 
training translators to conduct postediting tasks.

>From my experience:

* experienced translators and translation revisers/editors:  
In the event that the use of minimal postediting results in the creation of a 
sublanguage in the target language, it is sometimes difficult for experienced 
translators and translation editors to accept translating and work with with a 
level of quality that is lower than what they have done for years.

* junior translators: Training junior translators has the benefit of having to 
spend less work helping untrain people on what they have done for years.  They 
are often easier to convince that the postediting task is just one method of 
translating rather than simply a complete rearrangement of a translation 
process cycle, or simply a substandard level of translation quality.

Regards,
Jeff