While definitions of full and light post-editing have been around for a while, and error typologies like DQF and MQM gained in prominence since the beginning of last decade, for a long time customers tended to refuse to be flexible as for their final quality requirements, irrespective of the text type, purpose, target audience etc. We are now finally seeing some change in this space, with a renewed interest in different machine translation (MT) and post-editing (PE) service levels. While existing definitions of light and full post-editing are useful as general guidelines, they typically remain too abstract and inflexible both for translation buyers and linguists. Besides, they are inconsistent and overlap across the literature and different Language Service Providers (LSPs). In this paper, we comment on existing industry standards and share our experience on several challenges, as well as ways to steer customer conversations and provide clear instructions to post-editors.

In the last couple of years, machine translation technology has seen major changes with the breakthrough of neural machine translation (NMT), a growing number of providers and translation platforms. Machine Translation generally is experiencing a peak in demand from translation buyers, thanks to Machine Learning and AI being omnipresent in the media and at industry events. At the same time, new models for defining translation quality are becoming more widely adopted. These changes have profound implications for translators, LSPs and translation buyers: translators have to adjust their post-editing approaches, while LSPs and translation buyers are faced with decisions on selecting providers, best approaches for updating MT systems, financial investments, integrating tools, and getting the timing for implementation right for an optimum ROI.In this tutorial on MT and post-editing we would like to continue sharing the latest trends in the field of MT technologies, and discuss their impact on post-editing practices as well as integrating MT on large, multi-language translation programs. We will look at tool compatibility, different use cases of MT and dynamic quality models, and share our experience of measuring performance.

While Neural Machine Translation (NMT) technology has been around for a few years now in research and development, it is still in its infancy when it comes to customization readiness and experience with implementation on an enterprise scale with Language Service Providers (LSPs). For large, multi-language LSPs, it is therefore not only important to stay up-to-date on latest research on the technology as such, the best use cases, as well as main advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, due to this infancy, the challenges encountered during an early adoption of the technology in an enterprise-scale translation program are of a very practical and concrete nature and range from the quality of the NMT output over availability of language pairs in (customizable) NMT systems to additional translation workflow investments and considerations with regard to involving the supply chain. In an attempt to outline the above challenges and possible approaches to overcome them, this paper describes the migration of an established enterprise-scale machine translation program of 28 language pairs with post-editing from a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) setup to NMT.

While an increasing number of (automatic) metrics is available to assess the linguistic quality of machine translations, their interpretation remains cryptic to many users, specifically in the translation community. They are clearly useful for indicating certain overarching trends, but say little about actual improvements for translation buyers or post-editors. However, these metrics are commonly referenced when discussing pricing and models, both with translation buyers and service providers. With the aim of focusing on automatic metrics that are easier to understand for non-research users, we identified Edit Distance (or Post-Edit Distance) as a good fit. While Edit Distance as such does not express cognitive effort or time spent editing machine translation suggestions, we found that it correlates strongly with the productivity tests we performed, for various language pairs and domains. This paper aims to analyse Edit Distance and productivity data on a segment level based on data gathered over some years. Drawing from these findings, we want to then explore how Edit Distance could help in predicting productivity on new content. Some further analysis is proposed, with findings to be presented at the conference.