Studying Post-Editese in a Professional Context: A Pilot Study

Abstract

The past few years have seen the multiplication of studies on post-editese, following the massive adoption of post-editing in professional translation workflows. These studies mainly rely on the comparison of post-edited machine translation and human translation on artificial parallel corpora. By contrast, we investigate here post-editese on comparable corpora of authentic translation jobs for the language direction English into French. We explore commonly used scores and also proposes the use of a novel metric. Our analysis shows that post-edited machine translation is not only lexically poorer than human translation, but also less dense and less varied in terms of translation solutions. It also tends to be more prolific than human translation for our language direction. Finally, our study highlights some of the challenges of working with comparable corpora in post-editese research.

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Reproductions