Does the perceived source of a translation (NMT vs. HT) impact student revision quality for news and literary texts?

Publication type
C1
Publication status
Published
Authors
Li, X., & Daems, J
Editor
Bram Vanroy, Marie-Aude Lefer, Lieve Macken, Paola Ruffo, Ana Guerberof Arenas and Damien Hansen
Series
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Creative-text Translation and Technology (CTT)
Pagination
14-26
Publisher
European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT)
Conference
Second Workshop on Creative-text Translation and Technology (CTT) (Geneva, Switzerland)
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Abstract

With quality improvements in neural machine translation (NMT), scholars have argued that human translation revision and MT post-editing are becoming more alike, which would have implications for translator training. This study contributes to this growing body of work by exploring the ability of student translators (ZH-EN) to distinguish between NMT and human translation (HT) for news text and literary text and analyses how text type and student perceptions influence their subsequent revision process. We found that participants were reasonably adept at distinguishing between NMT and HT, particularly for literary texts. Participants’ revision quality was dependent on the text type as well as the perceived source of translation. The findings also highlight student translators’ limited competence in revision and post-editing, emphasizing the need to integrate NMT, revision, and post-editing into translation training programmes.