Qualität des Posteditierens von maschinell erstellten Übersetzungen technischer Texte aus dem Slowakischen ins Deutsche durch erstsprachig slowakische Posteditoren

Abstract

Summary While the rule of thumb that translators translate into their first language (L1) is often desirable, the demand for translations from lesser used into widely used languages often forces translators into this practice because it outstrips supply. The aim of this study is to show readers how the quality of the reference human translation (REF) produced by translators with Slovak as their L1 can influence the assessment of the quality of machine translation output (MT output), using the example of the light post-edited machine translation output (MTPE output) of technical documentation (TD) from Slovak into German by post-editors (PE) with Slovak as their L1. We therefore use the percentage difference between the TER and HTER scores to compare those segments of the studied TD that the machine translated differently than the human, whereby the PE nonetheless adopted such MT output or only partially changed it. We have divided the results into 6 categories of segments based on the differences between TER and HTER, where the difference between TER and HTER was below 50 %. We found that inappropriate REF and different, but not always wrong, solutions adopted by the PE compared to the REF translator can also result in poor evaluation of the MTPE output.