Comparing post-editing difficulty of different machine translation errors in Spanish and German translations from English

Abstract

Post-editing (PE) of Machine Translation (MT) is an increasingly popular way to integrate MT in the professional translation workflow, as it increases productivity and income. However, the quality of MT is not always good enough to blindly choose PE over translation from scratch. This article studies the PE of different error types and compares indicators of PE difficulty in English-to-Spanish and English-to-German translations. The results show that the indicators in question 1) do not correlate between each other for all error types, and 2) differ between languages.