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Translation Spaces: Online-First Articles

Is post-editing really faster than human translation?

ORCID logo | University of Manchester
Time efficiency is paramount for the localisation industry, which demands ever-faster turnaround times. However, translation speed is largely underresearched, and there is a lack of clarity about how language service providers (LSPs) can evaluate the performance of their post-editing (PE) and human translation (HT) services. This study constitutes the first large-scale investigation of translation and revision speed in HT and in the PE of neural machine translation, based on real-world data from an LSP. It uses an exploratory data analysis approach to investigate data for 90 million words translated by 879 linguists across 11 language pairs, over 2.5 years. The results of this research indicate that (a) PE is usually but not always faster than HT; (b) average speed values may be misleading; (c) translation speed is highly variable; and (d) edit distance cannot be used as a proxy for post-editing productivity, because it does not correlate strongly with speed.
Keywords: Post-editing, neural machine translation, post-editing speed, post-editing effort, productivity, translation speed, revision, edit distance
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Related work
  • 3.Data overview and selection
  • 4.Exploratory data analysis approach
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1(A)typical translation speed values
    • 5.2Is speed more variable in post-editing or human translation?
    • 5.3Correlations between speed and edit distance
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.22044.ter
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