The impact of post-editing and machine translation on creativity and reading experience
Antonio Toral | University of Groningen
This article presents the results of a study involving the translation of a fictional story from English into Catalan in
three modalities: machine-translated (MT), post-edited (MTPE) and translated without aid (HT). Each translation was analysed to evaluate its
creativity. Subsequently, a cohort of 88 Catalan participants read the story in a randomly assigned modality and completed a survey. The
results show that HT presented a higher creativity score if compared to MTPE and MT. HT also ranked higher in narrative engagement, and
translation reception, while MTPE ranked marginally higher in enjoyment. HT and MTPE show no statistically significant differences in any
category, whereas MT does in all variables tested. We conclude that creativity is highest when professional translators intervene in the
process, especially when working without any aid. We hypothesize that creativity in translation could be the factor that enhances reading
engagement and the reception of translated literary texts.
Keywords: creativity, machine translation post-editing, literary translation, narrative engagement, translation reception
Published online: 06 November 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.20035.gue
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.20035.gue
References
References
Aziz, Wilker, Sheila Castilho, and Lucia Specia
Bayer-Hohenwarter, Gerrit
2013 “Triangulating Translational Creativity Scores.” In Tracks and Treks in Translation Studies: Selected Papers from the EST Congress, Leuven 2010, edited by Catherine Way, Sonia Vandepitte, Reine Meylaerts, and Magdalena Bartłomiejczyk, 108: 63–85. New York, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Accessed August 2020. https://benjamins.com/catalog/btl.108. 
Besacier, Laurent, and Lane Schwartz
Bojar, Ondřej, Rajen Chatterjee, Christian Federmann, Yvette Graham, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, et al.
Busselle, Rick, and Helena Bilandzic
Cadwell, Patrick, Sheila Castilho, Sharon O’Brien, and Linda Mitchell
Castilho, Sheila
Cordingley, Anthony, and Céline Frigau Manning
Daems, Joke, and Lieve Macken
Dixon, Peter, Marisa Bortolussi, Leslie C. Twilley, and Alice Leung
Doherty, Stephen, and Sharon O’Brien
Dunne, Ciarán
Göpferich, Susanne
Göpferich, Susanne, Gerrit Bayer-Hohenwarter, Friederike Prassl, and Stadlober Johanna
Green, Melanie C., and Timothy C. Brock
Green, Melanie C., Timothy C. Brock, and Geoff F. Kaufman
Guerberof-Arenas, Ana
2012 “Productivity and Quality in the Post-Editing of Outputs from Translation Memories and Machine Translation.” TDX (Tesis Doctorals En Xarxa). Ph.D. Thesis, Universitat Rovira i Virgili. Accessed August 2020. http://www.tdx.cat/handle/10803/90247
2017 “Chapter 7. Quality Is in the Eyes of the Reviewer.” In Translation in Transition: Between Cognition, Computing and Technology, edited by Arnt Lykke Jakobsen and Bartolomé Mesa-Lao, 188–206. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Accessed August 2020. https://benjamins.com/catalog/btl.133.07gue. 
Guerberof-Arenas, Ana, Joss Moorkens, and Sharon O’Brien
Hakemulder, Jemeljan F.
Hewson, Lance
Kenny, Dorothy
Kenny, Dorothy, and Marion Winters
Kuijpers, Moniek
Kussmaul, Paul
1991 “Creativity
in the Translation Process: Empirical Approaches.” In Translation Studies: The
State of the Art. Proceedings from the First James S. Holmes Symposium on Translation Studies, edited
by Kitty M.
van Leuven-Zwart and Ton Naaijkens, Approaches
to Translation Studies
Series, 9: 91–101. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Kussmaul, Paul, and Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit
Kuzman, Taja, Špela Vintar, and Mihael Arčan
2019 “Neural Machine Translation of Literary Texts from English to Slovene.” In Proceedings of the Qualities of Literary Machine Translation, 1–9. Dublin, Ireland: European Association for Machine Translation. Accessed August 2020. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-7301
Mangen, Anne, and Don Kuiken
Matusov, Evgeny
2019 “The Challenges of Using Neural Machine Translation for Literature.” In Proceedings of the Qualities of Literary Machine Translation, 10–19. Dublin, Ireland: European Association for Machine Translation. Accessed August 2020. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-7302
Moorkens, Joss, Antonio Toral, Sheila Castilho, and Andy Way
O’Brien, Sharon
Rojo, Ana
Rojo, Ana, and Purificación Meseguer
Rojo, Ana, and María Ramos Caro
Rojo, Ana, and Marina
Ramos Caro
Runco, Mark A., and Garrett J. Jaeger
Saldanha, Gabriela
2005 “Style of Translation: An Exploration of Stylistic Patterns in the Translations of Margaret Jull Costa and Peter Bush.” Ph.D. Thesis, Dublin City University. Accessed August 2020. http://doras.dcu.ie/17624/
Schmidtke, Dag, and Declan Groves
2019 “Automatic Translation for Software with Safe Velocity.” In Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVII Volume 2: Translator, Project and User Tracks, 159–166. Dublin: European Association for Machine Translation. Accessed August 2020. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-6729
Snover, Matthew, Bonnie Dorr, Richard Schwartz, Linnea Micciulla, and John Makhoul
Toral, Antonio
2019 “Post-Editese: An Exacerbated Translationese.” 17th Machine Translation Summit. Accessed August 2020. http://arxiv.org/abs/1907.00900
Toral, Antonio, and Andy Way
Toral, Antonio, Antoni Oliver, and Pau Ribas-Bellestín
Toral, Antonio, Martijn Wieling, and Andy Way
Vanmassenhove, Eva, Dimitar Shterionov, and Andy Way
2019 “Lost in Translation: Loss and Decay of Linguistic Richness in Machine Translation.” 17th Machine Translation Summit (MTSummit2019), Dublin, Ireland, August 2019, Accessed August 2020. http://arxiv.org/abs/1906.12068
Vaswani, Ashish, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin
2017 “Attention Is All You Need.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30, edited by I. Guyon, U. V. Luxburg, S. Bengio, H. Wallach, R. Fergus, S. Vishwanathan, and R. Garnett, 5998–6008. Curran Associates, Inc. Accessed August 2020. http://papers.nips.cc/paper/7181-attention-is-all-you-need.pdf
Venuti, Lawrence
Vieira, Lucas, Xiaochun Zhang, Roy Yodaule, and Michael Carl
2020 “Machine Translation and Literary Texts: A Network of Possibilities.” Presented at the Creative Translation and Technologies Expert Meeting, University of Surrey, May 29. Accessed August 2020. https://surrey-ac.zoom.us/rec/play/uJcodr2u-zM3HtSRsgSDCv5xW420eqOs1CQb_KFfxEm8B3IDNValMLYTM7FO1h7mhKk4iDA5fD0Ac0Ah
Vinay, Jean Paul, and Jean Darbelnet