Márta Lesznyák: A longitudinal investigation of translation trainees’ translation and post-editing competence development I
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1 Literature review
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1.1 Definitions of basic terms
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1.1.3 Post-editing

1.1.3 Post-editing

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

The ISO 18587:2017 (International Organization for Standardization, 2017), which describes the requirements for the process of full, human post-editing of machine translation output, defines post-editing as the correction of “raw” machine translation by a human translator. A similar definition is provided by Massardo and her colleagues: “the process of improving a machine-generated translation with a minimum of manual labor” (Massardo et al., 2016, 14). Maybe the most comprehensive definition comes from O’Brien (2011), who defined post-editing as “the correction of raw machine translated output by a human translator according to specific guidelines and quality criteria” (O’Brien 2011, 197). For the purposes of the present investigation, the last definition is relevant and applicable; nevertheless, some problems related to defining post-editing should be highlighted here.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

At first glance, translation revision and post-editing seem to differ in one aspect only: the text to be revised and edited is produced by a human in the translation revision condition, but by a computer software in the post-editing condition. However, after careful examination of the nature of the texts to be revised, it becomes evident that the initial text in translation revision is a finalised, self-revised version produced in a translation process that has been deemed complete by the translator. In contrast, the initial text in PE, that is, the MT output, is just a first draft and by no means a finalised product (Do Carmo & Moorkens, 2020; Rico Pérez, 2022). The difference may look small, but Do Carmo and Moorkens (2020) suggest that the “revision view” of post-editing, that is, thinking that it is simply revising, has contributed to the misconceptualization and thus to the devaluation of post-editing. The authors argue that post-editing is and should be viewed as creative text-production, which is supported by MT.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Initial definitions of post-editing very often distinguished between partial (or light) and full post-editing (Allan 2003). Full post-editing denoted human-translation-like quality and was primarily meant for publication or official purposes. In light post-editing, the idea was that the final text should be comprehensible, and language and style errors do not matter as long as the message is clear. This way, the translation process was assumed to become more efficient financially and in terms of time. However, with the emergence of NMT, the distinction lost its validity, because NMT output is usually a more or less comprehensible and even correct, nicely flowing text. In other words, it is light post-edited quality (Rico Pérez, 2024). As a result, in this volume, the term post-editing will always refer to full post-editing unless otherwise indicated.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Finally, it must be mentioned here that automatic post-editing exists, too, which is the improvement of MT output based on corpora of post-edited texts (Do Carmo et al., 2021). As our study did not rely on automatic post-editing, it will not be discussed in this paper.
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