Post-editese: an Exacerbated Translationese

Post-editese: an Exacerbated Translationese Antonio Toral Center for Language and Cognition University of Groningen The Netherlands a.toral.ruiz@rug.nl Abstract Post-editing (PE) machine translation (MT) is widely used for dissemination because it leads to higher productivity than human translation from scratch (HT). In addition, PE translations are found to be of equal or better quality than HTs. However, most such studies measure quality solely as the number of errors. We conduct a set of computational analyses in which we compare PE against HT on three dif- ferent datasets that cover five translation directions with measures that address different translation universals and laws of translation: simplification, normalisation and interference. We find out that PEs are simpler and more normalised and have a higher degree of interference from the source language than HTs. 1 Introduction Machine translation (MT) is nowadays widely used in industry for dissemination purposes by means of post-editing (PE, also referred to as PEMT in the literature), a machine-assisted ap- proach to translation that results in notable in- creases in translation productivity compared to un- aided human translation (HT), as shown in nu- merous research studies, e.g. Plitt and Mas- selot (2010). In theory, one would claim that HTs1 and PE translations are clearly different, since, in the c⃝ 2019 The authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 licence, no derivative works, attribution, CC- BY-ND. 1By HT we refer to translations produced by a human from scratch, i.e. without the assistance of an MT system or any other computer-assisted technology, e.g. translation memo- ries. translation workflow of the latter, the translator is primed by the output of an MT system (Green et al., 2013), resulting in a translation that should then contain, to some extent, the footprint of that MT system. Because of this, one would conclude that HT should be preferred over PE, as the former should be more natural and adhere more closely to the norms of the target language. However, many research studies have shown that the qual- ity of PE is comparable to that of HT or even bet- ter, e.g. Koponen (2016), and, according to one study (Bowker and Buitrago Ciro, 2015), native speakers do not have a clear preference for HT over PE. In this paper we conduct a set of computational analyses on several datasets that contain HTs and PEs, involving different language directions and domains as well as PE performed according to dif- ferent guidelines (e.g. full versus light). Our aim is to find out whether HT and PE differ significantly in terms of different phenomena. Since previous research has proven the existence of translationese, i.e. the fact that HT and original text exhibit dif- ferent characteristics, our current research can be framed as a quest to find out whether there is ev- idence of post-editese, i.e. the fact that HT (or translationese) and PE would be different. The characteristics of translationese can be grouped along the so-called universal features of translation or translation universals (Baker, 1993), namely simplification, normalisation …

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