Resumen de Enhancement of post-editing performance: introducing machine translation post-editing in translator training
The key objectives of this thesis were to explore the profile of translators involved in post-editing, to outline the scope of required competencies and skills and to suggest a valid training proposal that would enhance post-editing performance of novice post-editors in conformity with the European Higher Education Area requirements.
The thesis integrated two sequential studies: a survey-based research that yielded authentic information concerning post-editors’ profiles and practices and an empirical-experimental research that put the suggested training model to the test and involved a total of 46 translation students in the final year of their Bachelor’s program. To collect conclusive evidence about the applicability of the proposal across different linguistic backgrounds, the study focused on 22 participants who were students at Kharkiv National Aerospace University (Ukraine) and specialized in English-Russian translation, and 24 participants who were students at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) and specialized in English-Spanish translation. The suggested training model pursued acquisition of conceptual and operational knowledge by the trainees and was incorporated in a pretest-posttest experimental study. The impact of such model was examined by the evaluation of the quality of post-edited segments and throughput rates demonstrated by the participants as well as the students’ attitudes to MTPE-related issues and self-evaluation of their post-editing performance before and after the training. The thesis ends with reflections upon the changes that might be brought to the proposal if neural machine translation systems were used to generate the training corpus.
The dissertation contributes to the definition of the scope of post-editors’ professional expertise, offers a scalable training model and describes to what extent such model may enhance post-editing performance in undergraduate translation students.
