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Advice to freelance translators on MT post-editing projects
MT post-editing projects can be divided into two main categories, depending on the expected level of quality of the final output:
For marketing content, “perfection” is clearly a must, but for technical manuals, “readability” can be deemed sufficient. Thanks to the large number of projects we have been handling at e2f translations, the largest English to French single language vendor, we have been able to categorize them as “Good” or “Bad” from a production perspective. Unfortunately, we often had to wait until the post-mortem phase to know whether the project was “Good” or “Bad!” The following are some of the characteristics of a “Good” project:
When all of the above is true, the linguist feels involved and the quality of the output increases throughout the project, along with the productivity and happiness of the linguist! In “Bad” projects, the opposite happens:
In this type of project, the linguist gets increasingly frustrated, as
the same mistakes have to be corrected over and over again, while the
overall productivity remains unchanged.
- If the sentence is very long, erase it and translate from scratch (the longer the sentence, the more likely it is that the engine will have made a large number of mistakes and that it will be faster to start over). - If the sentence is short but does not make sense, erase it and translate from scratch (if you are going to change most of the words, you might as well start over). - Otherwise, read the source text and edit the target text, as little as possible. To summarize, the best advice we can give to freelance translators willing to take the plunge into MT post-editing is:
Very similar advice can be applied to standard translation projects, which proves that MT engines are just another tool and not the revolution some linguists are scared about! Published - March 2013
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