Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Interesting article on MT post-editing

Jeff Allen has begun an interesting thread on ProZ by linking to a new article on his on machine translation post-editing (What is Post-editing?).

According to Jeff post-editing of machine-translated text would permit to reduce translation time by up to 70%, while producing professional high-quality translations.

In order to achieve such gains, a good procedure needs to be in place, so that the necessary terminological work be done before the MT stage.

Furthermore,the post-editing should be done by a fully qualified professional.

I think this is very important, as it points to a future in which MT translation becomes another tool (although maybe the most important one) in a professional translator's kit: just like, in the past twenty five years or so, our profession has been revolutionized first by the coming of the personal computer, and then by CAT programs.

3 comments:

  1. I am still somewhat reluctant to use machine translation. I have tried myself to utilize it, although, I must admit, the MT program I had was quite cheap and probably not suitable for the kind of tranlsations I do. The greatest obstacle for me is the fact that I love translating from scratch and don't like to edit other people's work including the work of a non-human translation program. Just my 2 cents.
    Where's your Atom feed, btw?

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  2. My own experience with MT is fairly limited, although sometimes I do use a fairly simple program: I find that in certain limited domains (such as software documentation translation) it actually helps, at least when the SL is written clearly in fairly short sentences.

    I expect that more professional level programs, coupled with the kind of rigorous procedures that Jeff describes, would actually yield better results, at least in certian fields.

    BTW. I've now added a site feed... hope it works (I'm still very new at blogging).

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  3. Yes, it works fine. Great. Thanks.

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