Master’s students’ post-editing perception and strategies

Abstract

Abstract The present article aims at presenting the results of an exploratory post-editing process study carried out in a Belgian university, the University of Mons. For this experiment, 64 final-year translation students with no post-editing experience post-edited from English into French parts of five different institutional texts from the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission. They were additionally asked to fill in a prospective questionnaire and a retrospective one, related to their post-editing perception and strategies. Four students took part in the experiment on a separate computer equipped with an eye-tracking device, so that eye-tracking data could be collected and compared with these students’ questionnaires. We found that results related to eye-tracking data correlate well with previous research, and that students’ perceptions of post-editing depend on each university’s particular context.