A Bibliometric Analysis of Machine Translation Post-editing from 2012 to 2021

Abstract

Machine translation post-editing (MTPE) has gained a lot of attention lately. This paper conducted a bibliometric analysis of 270 publications on MTPE retrieved from the core database of Web of Science in recent decade from 2012 to 2021 with the aid of literature analysis software VOSviewer. By means of keyword co-occurrence and clustering of literature co-citation, this paper reviews the distribution of annual publications, disciplines, institutions and authors, citation structure of MTPE, etc. Meanwhile, the future trends related to the study of MTPE are predicted so as to provide reference and inspiration for further research. The research findings are as follows: the number of MTPE publications has fluctuated in the past decade, but the overall trend is increasing; MTPE studies are mainly distributed in linguistics and computer science; Dublin City University in Ireland is currently the most productive institution in MTPE research, and Joss Moorkens from the university plays a critical role in promoting the cooperation between scholars in this field; Spain is currently the most productive country in MTPE, but Ireland is the most cited country in the literature. From the analysis of keywords, the paper concludes that most of the current MTPE articles focus on the key concepts of “quality” and “effort while in the future, “NMT”, “translation quality assessment” and “MTPE skills and training” will be the research trends.