Pre-professional pre-conceptions

Pre-professional pre-conceptions Laura Bruno Antonio Miloro Paula Estrella Facultad de Lenguas, UNC C´ordoba, Argentina laurabruno@fl.unc.edu.ar tr.miloro@gmail.com pestrella@famaf.unc.edu.ar Mariona Sabat´e Carrove Facultad de Letras Universitat de Lleida Pl. de V´ıctor Siurana, 1 E-25003 Lleida, Spain msabate@dal.udl.cat Abstract While MT+PE has become an industry standard, our translation schools are not able to accompany these changes by updat- ing their academic programs. We polled 100 pre-professionals to confirm that in our local context they are reluctant to ac- cept post-editing jobs mainly because they have inherited pre-conceptions or negative opinions about MT during their studies. 1 Pre-professionals and MT+PE Following global trends, the translation industry in Latin America has dramatically changed over the years and Argentina is emerging as an im- portant translation provider. However, our local context is quite different from that of the USA, Canada or Europe, as we are a monolingual coun- try and placed at the end of the supply chain, with more intermediaries between MT producers and Post-Editors. While the emergence of new MT+PE technologies has had an impact on busi- nesses and companies, our translation schools have fallen short of this challenge and failed to update their academic programs. Therefore, our soon- to-be professionals are not acquainted with the MT+PE process and they inherit old prejudices that sometimes do not even hold anymore. We felt the need to ask those future translators their opin- ion about the technologies they will come across once they enter the labour market. So, we polled 100 advanced undergraduates students in their 4th and 5th year (i.e. pre-professionals) and invited them to answer 8 questions about their experience c⃝ 2018 The authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence, no derivative works, attribution, CC- BY-ND. and opinion on MTPE. For space reasons the ques- tions and detailed results are not included in this abstract. Our sample consists of 90 non-bilingual informants from the School of Languages, Univer- sidad Nacional de C´ordoba, UNC and 10 bilingual (Spanish-Catalan) informants from the School of Arts, Dept. of English and Linguistics, Univer- sity of Lleida (UdL). We decided to include stu- dents from these two institutions to compare the results obtained as both groups of informants have a different academic and cultural profile and back- ground, but none of them reported any experience in PE. When compiling the results we found that opinions about MT were mostly negative in 40% (UL) and 50% (UNC) of the cases while opinions about PE were mostly positive 43% (UL) and 40% (UNC) of the cases. When looking at the partic- ipants’ comments, we found that most negative comments revolved around the payment model, MT producing awkward output or errors, and not having the chance to practice PE during their stud- ies. On the other hand, positive comments were about recent improvements of MT quality, MT+PE speeding-up their tasks and helping them develop other skills. These results are consistent with our expectations and confirm that new professionals in our local context are reluctant to accept post- editing …

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