Study on the use of machine translation and post-editing in Swiss-based language service providers

Abstract

Machine translation and post-editing have been recently attracting attention both from academia and industry, which can be measured by the number of publications, conferences and research projects on the subject. However, information on the use of these practices by language service providers is still scarce. In order to fill this gap, we conducted a survey among Swiss language service providers between June and August 2015. During that period, 16 valid responses were collected from 68 companies that had been identified and contacted. The analysis of the answers revealed that only 2 out of 16 companies were using a machine translation system combined with human post-editing in their translation workflow. More than half of the remaining 14 companies who answered negatively argued that machine translation was not considered a reliable asset. Most of them were not considering using machine translation in the future, or were unsure about it.