Everyone is familiar with it. Google Translate. A free translation software often used to determine the meaning of an unknown word in another natural language. Translating entire texts using a method as this will often cause consternation in most people: “That’s not possible with a machine! Machine translation is much too literal ”. This is true to some extent. A machine will simply translate the texts a word at a time without taking into consideration their context. This is where the fine art of post-editing comes into its own.
What is post-editing?
Post-editing is a term that’s, perhaps, unfamiliar to many. However, it merely refers to the revision (after it has been translated) of a text. The term ‘post-editing’ is usually applied when editing machine translated texts. This is in contrast to the term ‘editing,’ which is applied to the revision of texts that have been translated by an individual.
Machine translation is increasingly being utilized as a tool to assist human translators. It introduces a whole new way of editing. Machine translated texts are often distorted whereby the original meaning of the text becomes lost. The post-editor is responsible for restoring the meaning lost in translation.
The benefits of post-editing?
Post-editing can be sub-divided into two distinctive forms. A text can be translated purely with the essence of the story in mind or it should be of a quality that doesn’t suggest the text is machine translated. The danger of post-editing is that an editor can become too focused on the translation and lose sight of the original context.
An important question here is “why use machine translation?” It quite simply boils down to an age-old motive: money. Machine translation is quick and, depending on the volume, free. The costs for an editor after post-editing may possibly be lower than the costs for a translator.
This form of translation can prove to be beneficial or not, depending on the type of text. When a book with complex texts and storylines is machine translated, it becomes distorted in such a way that the original context also becomes lost. Translating a list of keywords from AdWords on the other hand merely requires a quick round of editing to bring the translation on par with its human equivalent. What do you think of machine translation/post-editing and what do you think the future holds for this technology?