Poll: Have you noticed an increase in requests from clients for post-editing?

Gaelle Henriet wrote:

Hi,

I worked for 3 years as an in-house post-editor for the MT department of a large translation company and I can see from the other posts on this topic that there's still a lot of misconceptions about PE, both from translators and smaller agencies.
Two things to distinguish:
- widely available, free MT, which can only be used for what we call "gisting". It helps you get the idea of what a text is about, that's all.
- publishable quality, humanly post-edited and reviewed machine translation.
People fail to see the difference between the two.

Believe me, machine translation that has been post-edited and reviewed properly is just as good as a conventional translation + review.

What MT does is that, instead of translating segments from scratch, you already have some content in the segments which are below a certain TM match. In the case of rules-based MT, you can be pretty certain that all your terminology will be there, but you'll have to reformulate a little. In the case of statistical MT, the style should be closer to human translation but your terminology has chances of being less accurate.
In both cases, the productivity of an experienced post-editor can be faster up to 25% than on a conventional translation (on the same project).

But of course, these MT systems are only really good when maintained properly by clients who make this commitment. The terminology implemented in dictionaries for RBMT and the corpus used for SMT have to be adequate and specific to each project. Otherwise, we're back to sqaure one, i.e. Google Translate and similar, based on just about anything that ends up on the Web.

All I'm saying is, don't slag off MT in general because you've had experience with companies approaching it the wrong way. Also bear in mind that it's a new skill to learn. Like any learning curve, it takes a bit of time. You won't necessarily see your productivity go up on the first project you'll try, but once you're used to it, it's an absolute breeze.

I urge you to keep an open mind about MT because it's going to get bigger and bigger. Of course, some domains will probably never be suitable for MT, so some of you can shelter in their specialisation and never be exposed to post-editing. But believe me, you'll miss out on something!

Gaelle Henriet wrote:
- widely available, free MT, which can only be used for what we call "gisting". It helps you get the idea of what a text is about, that's all.
- publishable quality, humanly post-edited and reviewed machine translation.
People fail to see the difference between the two.
... machine translation that has been post-edited and reviewed properly is just as good as a conventional translation + review.