An empirical investigation of temporal and technical post-editing effort

This article reports on a study designed to quantify temporal and technical post-editing effort in machine translated texts. The study involved two groups of English>German translators, one instructed to post-edit a machine-translated text and the other to translate the same text from English into German. In addition, text segments containing negative translatability indicators (NTIs) were isolated in order to compare the effort involved in post-editing and translating segments with such indicators and without. Results indicate that the post-editing effort for all segments was lower than the translation effort for those segments. Additional results suggest, among other things, that the removal of NTIs may reduce relative post-editing effort overall.