Márta Lesznyák: A longitudinal investigation of translation trainees’ translation and post-editing competence development I
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3 Results and Discussion
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3.2 The discussion of novices’ results
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3.2.3 The translation and the post-editing experience (research question 1.6)

3.2.3 The translation and the post-editing experience (research question 1.6)

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In this chapter, first-year students’ responses to the follow-up questionnaire will be analysed. The analysis focuses on the perceived difficulty of translating and post-editing as well as on some aspects of post-editing as perceived by the participants. Students’ perceptions are interesting in themselves from a research perspective, just as their expected changes over time. In addition, they can be incorporated into the analysis as potential confounding factors influencing performance.

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In the first part of the follow-up questionnaire, both translators and post-editors were asked to evaluate the overall difficulty of the task, as well as the difficulty of specific aspects of it. Independent samples t-tests showed no significant differences between the HT and the PE sub-samples: both groups rated the task to be moderately or slightly difficult (mean values approximately between 3 and 3.50, see Table 13), both in general and concerning terminology and thematic knowledge. HT and PE students were similar in their opinion on syntactic difficulty, too: they assessed the task to be difficult (mean values around 4, see Table 13).

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Repeated measures one-way ANOVAs supported the claim that both human translators and post-editors perceived the task to be demanding primarily from a syntactic point of view. In terms of the thematic knowledge required to translate the text, the task was seen as relatively easy. In addition, human translators felt that the text was more challenging from a terminological perspective than from that of the required thematic knowledge.

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The lack of differences between HT and PE students in our study stands in contrast to those of Latorraca (2023), who found that students in her sample rated the post-editing task easier. A major difference between her study and our study is that in Latorraca’s research, the same students post-edited and translated the same text. Both designs have their advantages and disadvantages. It may be tempting to assume that an individual who participates in both work modes would be in a better position to assess their difficulty. However, it is precisely the experience with both modes that makes it challenging to evaluate each one independently, without the influence of the other. In other words, translating the same text will influence the experience of post-editing the text and vice versa. This problem is avoided in our design, but due to the relatively low sample size, it is not certain that individual characteristics of translators were balanced in the two groups.

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At the same time, our findings are in line with Jia and Sun’s results (2023), who arrived at the conclusion that ST complexity and MT output quality affect perceived difficulty. Although the two variables were not assessed in our study, it cannot be ruled out that they have influenced participants’ perceptions.

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The dominance of syntactic difficulty in students’ perceptions may originate in the specific feature of the source text, but it can just as well reveal the characteristics of the student group, who assessed the ST and the task: high proficiency language learners at the beginning of their translation training may have an eye for linguistically complex structures but may be blind to challenging terminology and be completely unaware of the thematic knowledge they would need to translate or post-edit the text.

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An open-ended question on the questionnaire prompted students to name terminological problems from the source text. Statistical tests revealed that human translators and post-editors identified approximately the same number of problems and the same problems (mostly pragmatics terms). However, some students provided general terms, phrases, or even full sentences as responses to this question. These responses suggest that students at the beginning of their training are not fully aware of what terms are.

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In the next step, human translators and post-editors were compared on their tendency to select non-terms, and it was found that post-editors specified a significantly higher number of such problems (M = 1) than human translators (M = 0.13). At this point, it is very difficult to tell what caused this difference between human translators and post-editors. It can be individual differences, that is, those in the PE group could have been less knowledgeable about what terminological problems are, and thus, they may have misunderstood the question. However, it is equally possible that the process of post-editing changes the way the texts are processed and perhaps, memory functions, too, and this leads to changes in terminological problem identification. Further research is needed to explore this issue in more detail.

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The follow-up questionnaire included a series of questions designed to explore the specific experiences of post-editors. The first two questions asked respondents to compare the difficulty and the speed of post-editing with that of from-scratch translation. Students’ responses revealed that post-editing is indeed seen as faster but not as easier by novice students.

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The next three questions focused on how PE supported students’ work. Statistical tests showed that PE was perceived to have helped with typing and by offering a solid starting point (the pre-translated text), but not with terminology.

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As for the challenges of PE, students’ responses indicated that they felt that (a) it was difficult to decide whether the MT output was correct, and (b) to escape the wording of the MT output. Nevertheless, these problems were not considered to be serious. In addition, students indicated that they did not feel that the lack of creativity in post-editing would have a negative effect on their work.

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Post-editing-specific questions shed light on students’ subjective experiences with the task. These subjective experiences may or may not be in line with other objective data on the translation and post-editing process and product. However, the importance of these perceptions lies not so much in their ability to provide insights into the actual process but more in revealing the translators’ attitudes and emotional orientation towards post-editing. The data should be interpreted with these considerations in mind.

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PE students’ perception that post-editing is not easier than translation is in line with the findings of questions 4–7 on the follow-up questionnaire, which found no differences between translators and post-editors. At the same time, this finding appears to be in contrast to performance measures, which indicated that post-editors did better on the task than human translators. We could think that this was because post-editing was easier. However, the responses to the follow-up questions are not self-evaluations of performance, but they inform us about students’ perceived efforts. These results give support to Koponen’s conclusions (2012), who found that objective and subjective measures of difficulty are not always in line. By integrating performance indicators and data on students’ perceptions, we can arrive at the conclusion that post-editing leads to better performance. Nevertheless, translators subjectively feel that the work is as difficult as that of translation. Altogether, this is a positive finding indicating that better performance can be achieved with a similar amount of effort when post-editing.

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Temporal efficiency is another dimension where students expressed a positive opinion. They indicated that they perceived post-editing as faster than translation. This finding aligns with Norona Cunha’s (2023) and Á. Lesznyák’s (2019) results, which also indicate that students and translators perceive post-editing as time-efficient. Feelings of temporal efficiency may motivate post-editors irrespective of whether post-editing is faster in reality in a particular setting.

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Students’ responses gave support to claims that PE helps by providing a starting text (Herbig et al., 2021) and by saving typing (Á. Lesznyák, 2019). At the same time, students are aware that terminology cannot be trusted. This can be seen as a positive finding, although analysis focusing on terminology indicates that students were not particularly successful in finding the appropriate terms (Sermann, 2024). It is the lack of research and terminological competence on the part of the students that may explain this finding.

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Students’ responses to the post-editing-specific questions corroborated previous findings that the key drawbacks of post-editing include the difficulty of detaching from the phrasing of the MT output (i.e., anchoring bias) and deciding whether the MT output is correct. Whereas the first problem is rooted in human cognitive processing in general (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), the latter is more linked to students’ inexperience and uncertainty. Surprisingly, students did not think that the lack of creativity inscribed in post-editing would have prevented them from working effectively. This contradicts previous research findings (Álvarez Vidal et al., 2020; Cadwell et al., 2018; Eszenyi, 2023), which may be explained by the fact that our respondents were students with no previous experience in translation. Previous studies mostly collected professional translators’ opinions, who mourned the loss of a certain creative aspect of the job. It is probably something that novices could not have experienced before.

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After having analysed first-year students’ scores and results on the tests and questionnaires, we will turn to interpreting the results of the correlation analyses.
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