How to teach machine translation post-editing? Experiences from a post-editing course

Advances of machine translation technology have in recent years increased its use in various contexts. In the translation industry, work processes involving the use of machine translated texts as a raw translation to be post-edited by a translator are becoming increasingly common. The increasing use of post-editing processes also raises questions related to teaching and training of translators and post-editors, and institutions offering translator training have started to incorporate post-editing in their curricula. This paper describes a machine translation and post-editing course arranged at the University of Helsinki in Fall 2014. From the teacher’s perspective, we discuss experiences of planning and teaching of the post-editing course. The development of the students’ experiences and perception of the course contents, machine translation technology and post-editing are also discussed based on reflective essays written by the students after the course.

[1]  Dorte Haltrup Hansen,et al.  Let’sMT! as a Learning Platform for SMT , 2013, MTSUMMIT.

[2]  Ralph Weischedel,et al.  A STUDY OF TRANSLATION ERROR RATE WITH TARGETED HUMAN ANNOTATION , 2005 .

[3]  Enrique Torrejón,et al.  Skills and Profile of the New Role of the Translator as MT Post-editor , 2013 .

[4]  Marian Flanagan,et al.  Testing post-editing guidelines: how translation trainees interpret them and how to tailor them for translator training purposes , 2014 .

[5]  Christian Federmann.  Appraise: An Open-Source Toolkit for Manual Evaluation of Machine Translation Output , 2012 .

[6]  Hala Almaghout,et al.  A survey of machine translation competences: Insights for translation technology educators and practitioners , 2015 .

[7]  Leena Salmi,et al.  Machine Translation, Post-Editing and Respeaking: Challenges for Translator Training , 2014 .

[8]  Andy Way,et al.  Taking Statistical Machine Translation to the Student Translator , 2012, AMTA.

[9]  Ignacio Garcia,et al.  Is machine translation ready yet , 2010 .

[10]  Maarit Koponen,et al.  D9.2 MOLTO evaluation and assessment report , 2013 .

[11]  Anthony Pym,et al.  Translation Skill-Sets in a Machine-Translation Age , 2014 .

[12]  Mark Shuttleworth.  Combining MT and TM on a technology-oriented translation masters: aims and perspectives , 2002, EAMT.

[13]  Michael D. Kliffer.  Post-editing machine translation as an FSL exercise , 2008 .

[14]  Frank Austermuehl,et al.  Future (and not-so-future) trends in the teaching of translation technology , 2013 .

[15]  Hans Uszkoreit,et al.  The Finnish Language in the Digital Age , 2012, White Paper Series.

[16]  Ilse Depraetere,et al.  What counts as useful advice in a university post-editing training context? Report on a case , 2010, EAMT.

[17]  Hans P. Krings,et al.  Repairing Texts: Empirical Investigations of Machine Translation Post-Editing Processes , 2001 .

[18]  Michael Kliffer.  An experiment in MT post-editing by a class of intermediate/advanced French majors , 2005, EAMT.

[19]  Ignacio Garcia,et al.  Translating by post-editing: is it the way forward? , 2011, Machine Translation.

[20]  Stephen Doherty,et al.  The design and evaluation of a Statistical Machine Translation syllabus for translation students , 2014 .

[21]  Sharon O'Brien,et al.  Teaching post-editing: a proposal for course content , 2002, EAMT.

[22]  Selmer Bringsjord,et al.  Rage against the machine , 2012 .

[23]  Meritxell Gonz.  A Graphical Interface for MT Evaluation and Error Analysis , 2012 .

[24]  Stephen Doherty,et al.  Statistical machine translation in the translation curriculum: overcoming obstacles and empowering translators , 2014 .

[25]  Stephen Doherty,et al.  Investigating the experience of translation technology labs: pedagogical implications , 2013 .

[26]  Matthew G. Snover,et al.  A Study of Translation Edit Rate with Targeted Human Annotation , 2006, AMTA.

[27]  Enrique Torrejón,et al.  Controlled translation: a new teaching scenario tailor-made for the translation industry , 2002, EAMT.