Testing post-editing guidelines: how translation trainees interpret them and how to tailor them for translator training purposes

Abstract

There is a growing interest in machine translation (MT) and post-editing (PE). MT has been around for decades, but the use of the technology has grown significantly in the language industry in recent years, while PE is still a relatively new task. Consequently, there are currently no standard PE guidelines to use in translator training programmes. Recently, the first set of publicly available industry-focused PE guidelines (for ‘good enough’ and ‘publishable’ quality) were developed by Translation Automation User Society (TAUS) in partnership with the Centre for Global Intelligent Content (CNGL), which can be used as a basis on which to instruct post-editors in professional environments. This paper reports on a qualitative study that investigates how trainee translators on an MA course, which is aimed at preparing the trainees for the translation industry, interpret these PE guidelines for publishable quality. The findings suggest trainees have difficulties interpreting the guidelines, primarily due to trainee competency gaps, but also due to the wording of the guidelines. Based on our findings we propose training measures to address these competency gaps. Furthermore, we provide post-editing guidelines that we plan to use for our own post-editing training.