Post-editing of Machine Translation: Processes and Applications

Laura Winther Balling · Michael Carl · Sharon O'Brian

Mar 2014 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

Post-editing is possibly the oldest form of human-machine cooperation for translation. It has been a common practice for just about as long as operational machine translation systems have existed. Recently, however, there has been a surge of interest in post-editing among the wider user community, partly due to the increasing quality of machine translation output, but also to the availability of free, reliable software for both machine translation and post-editing. As a result, the practices and processes of the translation industry are changing in fundamental ways.

This volume is a compilation of work by researchers, developers and practitioners of post-editing, presented at two recent events on post-editing: The first Workshop on Post-editing Technology and Practice, held in conjunction with the 10th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, held in San Diego, in 2012; and the International Workshop on Expertise in Translation and Post-editing Research and Application, held at the Copenhagen Business School, in 2012.

About the author

Dr Sharon O’Brien is Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University and is current Director of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies. Her research centres around human interaction with machine translation, including topics such as post-editing, measuring the quality and usability of machine translated and human translated content, and translation tool design.

Dr Laura Winther Balling holds a PhD in Psycholinguistics from the University of Aarhus and is now Associate Professor of Experimental Psycholinguistics at Copenhagen Business School. She is fascinated by the multitude of complex cognitive processes that happen during translation, and works on investigating them experimentally using eye-tracking, keylogging and advanced statistical methods with inspiration from recent developments in psycholinguistics.

Dr Michael Carl is Associate Professor for Human and Machine Translation at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His current research interest is related to the investigation of human translation processes and interactive machine translation. He obtained his PhD from the Saarland University in 2001. Dr Carl has published more than 90 reviewed articles on international conferences and in journals, and is the co-editor of several books.

Dr Michel Simard is a Senior Researcher at the National Research Council Canada. His research focuses on machine translation and innovative tools for translation. He earned a PhD in Computer Science from the Université de Montréal in 2003, but has been actively involved in machine translation research since 1986. Previously, he has worked for the Canadian Government, the Université de Montréal and Xerox Research Centre Europe.

Dr Lucia Specia is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK. She is part of the Natural Language Processing research group. Her research focuses on machine translation, with special emphasis on automatic evaluation and estimation of translation quality and on ways of making machine translation more useful to end-users such as professional translators. She received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, in 2007.