With or without you? Effects of using machine translation to write flash fiction in the foreign language

With or without you? Effects of using machine translation to write flash fiction in the foreign language Nora Aranberri IXA research group University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU nora.aranberri@ehu.eus Abstract The improvement in the quality of machine translation (MT) for both majority and mi- nority languages in recent years is result- ing in its steady adoption. This is not only happening among professional trans- lators but also among users who occasion- ally find themselves in situations where translation is required or MT presents it- self as a easier means to producing a text. This work sets to explore the effect using MT has in flash fiction produced in the foreign language. Specifically, we study the impact in surface closeness, syntactic and lexical complexity, and edits. Results show that texts produced with MT seem to fit closer to certain traits of the for- eign language and that differences in the use of part-of-speech categories and struc- tures emerge. Moreover, the analysis of the post-edited texts reveals that partici- pants approach the editing of the MT out- put differently, displaying a wide range in the number of edits. 1 Introduction In recent years, the quality of machine translation (MT) has greatly improved, and as a consequence, increasingly more users are adopting the technol- ogy. These users can have varying profiles. On the one hand, we find professional translators, and on the other hand, we have users who do not be- long directly in the translation industry but still, occasionally, need translations. Among the latter, c⃝ 2020 The authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence, no derivative works, attribution, CC- BY-ND. we can distinguish scenarios where MT is used in professional settings and scenarios where MT is used to reduce the translation effort in the private sphere. A good few studies have been conducted on the impact of MT for professional translators but still numerous questions remain unanswered. Among others, this research has focused on analysing how translating using MT differs from translating from scratch and on ways to optimally provide the au- tomated translation to these professionals. How- ever, little research has been carried out on non- professional translators, even when freely avail- able online systems have been providing auto- mated translations for a long time, since 2006 in the case of Google Translate. This situation leaves us with little insight into what happens when non- specialists avail of MT. The scarce research carried out on regular users has mainly focused on measuring the usefulness of MT for assimilation, that is, to facilitate com- prehension. Nurminen (2018) reported that people are using MT increasingly more for gisting pur- poses and that they are prepared to accept different quality levels for comprehension and for publica- tion. Bowker (2009) and Bowker and Ciro (2015) fo- cused their efforts on the Canadian context. In the former study, the author examined the potential acceptance of MT output by minority communi- ties. She reported a positive attitude towards out- put that had undergone …

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