Proficiency and External Aides: Impact of Translation Brief and Search Conditions on Post-editing Quality

Longhui Zou, Michael Carl, Masaru Yamada, Takanori Mizowaki


Abstract
This study investigates the impact of translation briefs and search conditions on post-editing (PE) quality produced by participants with different levels of translation proficiency. We hired five Chinese student translators and seven Japanese professional translators to conduct full post-editing (FPE) and light post-editing (LPE), as described in the translation brief, while controlling two search conditions i.e., usage of a termbase (TB) and internet search (IS). Our results show that FPE versions of the final translations tend to have less errors than LPE ver- sions. The FPE translation brief improves participants’ performance on fluency as compared to LPE, whereas the search condition of TB helps to improve participants’ performance on accuracy as compared to IS. Our findings also indicate that the occurrences of fluency errors produced by experienced translators (i.e., the Japanese participants) are more in line with the specifications addressed in translation briefs, whereas the occurrences of accuracy errors pro- duced by inexperienced translators (i.e., our Chinese participants) depend more on the search conditions.
Anthology ID:
2022.amta-wetpr.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th biennial conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Workshop 1: Empirical Translation Process Research)
Month:
September
Year:
2022
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Venue:
AMTA
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Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
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Pages:
60–74
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.amta-wetpr.7
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Cite (ACL):
Longhui Zou, Michael Carl, Masaru Yamada, and Takanori Mizowaki. 2022. Proficiency and External Aides: Impact of Translation Brief and Search Conditions on Post-editing Quality. In Proceedings of the 15th biennial conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Workshop 1: Empirical Translation Process Research), pages 60–74, None. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
Proficiency and External Aides: Impact of Translation Brief and Search Conditions on Post-editing Quality (Zou et al., AMTA 2022)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2022.amta-wetpr.7.pdf