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Article published In:
FORUM
Vol. 18:1 (2020) ► pp.26–44

Master’s students’ post-editing perception and strategies

Exploratory study

| University of Mons

The present article aims at presenting the results of an exploratory post-editing process study carried out in a Belgian university, the University of Mons. For this experiment, 64 final-year translation students with no post-editing experience post-edited from English into French parts of five different institutional texts from the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission. They were additionally asked to fill in a prospective questionnaire and a retrospective one, related to their post-editing perception and strategies. Four students took part in the experiment on a separate computer equipped with an eye-tracking device, so that eye-tracking data could be collected and compared with these students’ questionnaires. We found that results related to eye-tracking data correlate well with previous research, and that students’ perceptions of post-editing depend on each university’s particular context.

Keywords: machine translation, post-editing, process, strategies, students
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research into post-editing process and perceptions
    • 2.1Students’ perception of post-editing practice
    • 2.2PE cognitive effort through the analysis of eye-tracking data
  • 3.Objectives
  • 4.Description of the experiment and methodology
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Chosen texts
    • 4.3Questionnaires
    • 4.4Eye-tracking
  • 5.Data and discussion
    • 5.1Questionnaires
      • 5.1.1Pre-test questionnaire
      • 5.1.2Retrospective questionnaire
    • 5.2Eye-Tracking and strategies
      • 5.2.1Results obtained through data analysis
      • 5.2.2Implications for future PE classes
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 16 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/forum.19014.pir
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