Translating or post-editing? The dilemma of translator trainers in the machine translation era A case study

Abstract

In this paper, the results of a teaching experience focused on post- editing machine translations (MT) of technical texts are presented. It is an exploratory study conducted in a specialised translation course in the third year of the bachelor’s degree in Translation and Interpreting and the joint honours degree in Humanities and Translation and Interpreting, as part of a teaching innovation project at University Pablo de Olavide. The main aim of the study is to evaluate whether permitting the use of MT engines in the translation classroom is appropriate. First, a representative sample of the existing studies that form the empirical context regarding the use of MT in translation training is introduced. Second, the general and specific objectives of the study are outlined, and the process and methodological tools designed for its implementation, as well as for obtaining and analysing the results, are described. Specifically, a group of students produces and self-revises the human translation (HT) of several technical texts, each of which is accompanied by a specific translation brief. Based on the same briefs, another group of students performs the full post-editing (PE) of the machine-generated translations of those same texts. The quality of the self-revised HTs and the full PE of the machine outputs are then compared. Drawing on the students’ own opinions on their performance — collected through an online questionnaire —, the study concludes that adopting a mixed methodology, encompassing both HT and PE practices, constitutes an appropriate teaching approach in the third-year classroom of the Translation and Interpreting degree programme.