It's a familiar term for people working in the post-editing, translation industry, or anyone interested in translation, but the concept is still unfamiliar to the general public. Some people think of a blog post. Post-editing (PE) literally means editing, correction, or inspection that takes place later. More specifically, it refers to the work of a translator reviewing and revising translation results obtained by machine translation. It is also called “MTPE (Machine Translation Post-Editing)” because it is based on machine-translated results. The translator that does this work is called a “post-editor (post-editor).” With the recent rise of machine translation, its importance is gradually growing.
As a representative post-editing work, there are various corpus projects, or corpus (corpus) projects, which have been actively carried out recently. It is the task of first translating a large amount of sentences related to a specific field or industry with a machine translation program and then the translator oversees it. The better the performance of machine translation, the shorter the time required for post-editing; conversely, if the performance of machine translation falls, the translator's post-editing time also increases. Not only that, in the translation process using CatTool, the work of modifying and completing translations presented by the CatTool program based on an existing database can also be called a type of post-editing.
In fact, post-editing is still not a pleasant job for many translators. This is because the machine translation program replaces the work of translators and reviews the initial translation results created by machine translation, so there is a feeling that the machine is assisting the machine. Also, since the quality of machine translation results is improved through post-editing, and the performance of machine translation programs improves as better results are accumulated, there is also a vague fear that translators will one day replace human translators. Also, if the performance of machine translation programs is poor, post-editing work becomes cumbersome, and there are frequent cases where it is better to re-translate altogether. In the case of translators involved in the Corpus business, labor costs are reduced due to the fact that they accept the initial translation later, but if the machine translation results are poor, it actually becomes more troublesome for translators; in a nutshell, they are often shunned because it is a task that does not match the balance.
However, the way we look at machine translation itself is changing these days. The performance of machine translation programs themselves has improved, and translators are also looking for ways to make the most of machine translation by considering machine translation as a work tool. Furthermore, as the idea that translators play an important role in the development of an advanced technology called machine translation grows, more and more translators are actively participating in post-editing work. Machine translation development companies also recognize that a translator's role as a post-editor is very important for program performance, so they place a large emphasis on the post-editing process itself in program development.
Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly evident that post-editing is not only for improving the performance of machine translation programs, but also greatly helps translators improve translation quality. By using machine translation in general translation work, it is possible to complete better quality translations by translators by adding careful review and selection by translators to the advantages of quickly deriving results and proposing various methods of machine translation. Of course, translation time is naturally saved during this process. This will be an advantage not only for translators, but also for translation companies, and even clients. As work time is reduced, costs are also saved.
When it comes to post-editing work, which has so many advantages, do translators simply act as post-editors? In fact, post-editing is the most important part of the work using machine translation, so it can be said that translators are at the core of it. Without proper post-editing, the quality of machine translation results cannot be guaranteed. As the final reviewer, the translator must find minor mistakes and errors that may be missed in the simplified work and strive to produce the most perfect result possible.
As translation companies are also able to work efficiently and quickly through post-editing, the number of projects that can be carried out simultaneously will also increase. Therefore, the efficient allocation and management of translator personnel resources according to the project will become important. For example, translator verification and placement issues based on the language direction of the work. When post-editing the results of machine translation from language A to language B, a translator who is very familiar with language B must work to improve work efficiency and completeness. This is obvious even in general translation work, but the reason it is even more emphasized in post-editing is that the translator's post-editing is the final inspection of the translation work. If a translator whose language ability has not been accurately verified, the final quality cannot be guaranteed and rework may be necessary. In this post-editing era, translation companies' intermediary and management roles will still be an important part.
Post-editing, which is in line with the development of machine translation, is a task that has always been done in translation work, even though the terminology itself is new. Along with future improvements in machine translation or artificial intelligence translation technology, research and discussions on post-editing are also being actively carried out. All members of the translation industry, such as translators and translation companies, will have to reconsider their positioning when it comes to post-editing, which is indispensable in the future translation market.
*This content has been transferred from Gicon Studio to Letterworks.
