Increased use of machine translation (MT) by clients and language service providers has resulted in a greater need for posteditors; however, conflicting or lack of postediting guidelines and acceptance criteria has created resistance among language specialists in providing this much needed service.
A recent survey by TAUS highlighted the main issues:
TAUS Survey, January 2010. Seventy-five language service providers responded to the questionnaire. Respondents were based in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and South America. This chart highlights the main issues.
With a view to improving conditions for post-editors and clients alike, TAUS is seeking your input to the questions below. The survey link is at the bottom of this article. It take less that 5-minutes to complete.
Survey questions
1. Do you believe that the standardization of the guidelines provided to posteditors on how to perform a light and full post-edit will increase client acceptance of the post-edited product and posteditor productivity? If so, would you be willing to participate in the creation of such guidelines?
2. Does your organization understand the different levels of postediting, what is involved for each level, and how that affects cost? If so, do you think that your acceptance criteria for each level are clear? If not, would you be willing to participate in creating normalized acceptance criteria?
3a. As a posteditor, have you received conflicting customer acceptance criteria?
3b. As a client, have you experienced resistance among language specialists to accept post-editing work and/or resistance from post-editors to stop before the postedited product is of near human quality?
If so, would you be willing to assist in the development of acceptance criteria for the different levels of post-editing with a view to standardizing customer expectations?
4. Have you, as an MT client or posteditor experienced a disconnect between estimated MT quality and the effort involved in post-editing?
Less than 5 minutes to complete the survey.
We will publish results and details of next steps during the third week of August 2010.
Related links
Workshop - Best practices for postediting
Report - Postediting in practice
Conference - TAUS User Conference 2010