How do students cope with machine translation output of Multi-Word Units? An exploratory study

Publication type
B2
Publication status
Published
Authors
Daems, J, Carl, M., Vandepitte, S., Hartsuiker, R., & Macken, L.
Editor
Ruslan Mitkov, Johanna Monti, Gloria Corpas Pastor and Violeta Seretan
Series
Multiword units in machine translation and translation technology
Volume
341
Pagination
62-80
Publisher
John Benjamins
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Abstract

In this chapter, we take a closer look at students' post-editing of multi-word units (MWUs) from English into Dutch. The data consists of newspaper articles post-edited by translation students as collected by means of advanced keystroke logging tools.
We discuss the quality of the machine translation (MT) output for various types of MWUs, and compare this with the final post-edited quality. In addition, we examine the external resources consulted for each type of MWU. Results indicate that contrastive MWUs are harder to translate for the MT system, and harder to correct by the student post-editors than non-contrastive MWUs. We further find that consulting a variety of external resources helps student post-editors solve MT problems.