The impact of traditional and interactive post-editing on Machine Translation User Experience, quality, and productivity

Abstract

This paper presents a user study with 15 professional translators in the English-Spanish combination. We present the concept of Machine Translation User Experience (MTUX) and compare the effects of traditional post-editing (TPE) and interactive post-editing (IPE) on MTUX, translation quality and productivity. Results suggest that translators prefer IPE to TPE because they are in control of the interaction in this new form of translator-computer interaction and feel more empowered in their interaction with Machine Translation. Productivity results also suggest that IPE may be an interesting alternative to TPE, given the fact that translators worked faster in IPE even though they had no experience in this new machine translation post-editing modality, but were already used to TPE.