Abstract
In the present study, we investigated the post-editese phenomenon, i.e., the unique features that set machine translated post-edited texts apart from human-translated texts. We used two literary texts, namely, the English children’s novel by Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (AW) and Paula Hawkins’ popular book The Girl on the Train (TGOTT). Both literary texts were Google translated from English into Brazilian Portuguese to investigate whether the post-editese features can be found on the surface of the post-edited (PE) texts. In addition, we examined how the features found in the PE texts differ from the features encountered in the human-translated (HT) and machine translation (MT) versions of the same source text. Results revealed evidence for post-editese for TGOTT only with PE versions being more similar to the MT output than to the HT texts.
Highlights
As our quest for the post-editese phenomenon involves capturing the differences between PE texts from other comparable translated texts (MT and human translation (HT)), we focus on the quest for the features that have been associated in the literature [8,9,10,11] with the hypothetical T-universal features, namely, simplification, explicitation, and convergence
It is interesting to observe that, for both the Adventures in Wonderland (AW) and The Girl on the Train (TGOTT) datasets, variance scores obtained from the features within the machine translation (MT) and the PE versions are very similar, indicating that they vary to a similar extent in terms of lexical density, lexical richness, sentence length, and sentence count
We investigated the existence of post-editese features in a corpus composed of excerpts from two different literary books: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Girl on the Train
Summary
Scores higher for creativity than PE translations, for reading experiences related to emotional engagement and narrative presence, no statistically significant differences between HT, MT, and PE have been found These results suggest that MT might have just started to become a tool to be considered when translating creative texts, but it is still an open question whether there are characteristics typical of PE literary texts and whether these characteristics possibly make them less creative than HT texts. Before presenting our methodology and the results of our experiments in detail, the section presents an overview of the research in the field of translation studies addressing the features of translated texts as opposed to non-translated texts, as well as recent research focusing on the quest for post-editese features
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
