Luca Desmet


2022

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Literary translation as a three-stage process: machine translation, post-editing and revision
Lieve Macken | Bram Vanroy | Luca Desmet | Arda Tezcan
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

This study focuses on English-Dutch literary translations that were created in a professional environment using an MT-enhanced workflow consisting of a three-stage process of automatic translation followed by post-editing and (mainly) monolingual revision. We compare the three successive versions of the target texts. We used different automatic metrics to measure the (dis)similarity between the consecutive versions and analyzed the linguistic characteristics of the three translation variants. Additionally, on a subset of 200 segments, we manually annotated all errors in the machine translation output and classified the different editing actions that were carried out. The results show that more editing occurred during revision than during post-editing and that the types of editing actions were different.