In this blog series, we are discussing the area of post-editing. In our earlier posts, ‘The Rise of PEMT‘ and ‘Cutting PEMT Times‘ we have discussed the meaning of automated post-editing, why its popularity is growing among Language Service Providers (LSPs), and how you can cut your post-editing times.
Machine Translated text can be post-edited to different quality levels. This post is based on post-editing guidelines that have been developed by TAUS with, among others, KantanMT’s partners DCU and CNGL. A link to these guidelines is available at the end of this post.
Post-editing to an understandable level
An understandable level of post-editing is a standard by which the main content of the message is correct and understandable for the user. However, the documents readability may not be perfect and there may be a number of styling errors. Correct styling however is not essential as long as the main message content is understandable.
Follow these rules to post-edit a translated text to an understandable level
- Ensure that the meaning of the translated text is the same as the source text and that it is understandable to the user
- Read through the document to make sure that there is no missing or excess information
- Because the translation is part of the localization process, make sure that the content is not offensive or culturally insensitive
- Correct basic spelling errors
- Errors that only effect the styling of the document do not need to be changed, so, there is no need to correct the following sentence, “Kantanmt is cloud based statistical machine translator platform”. Note: The stylistically correct version is “KantanMT is a cloud-based Statistical Machine Translation platform”
- Remember that the fewer post-edits there are the better – use as much of the original Machine Translation output as possible
- Don’t restructure sentences to improve the flow if the meaning is comprehensible
Post-editing to a quality standard similar to human translation
TAUS defines this level as being, “comprehensible (i.e. an end-user perfectly understands the content of the message), correct (i.e. it communicates the same meaning as the source text), stylistically fine, though the style may not be as good as that achieved by a native-speaking human translator. Syntax is normal, grammar and punctuation are correct”
Follow these rules to post-edit a translated text to this standard
- Ensure that content is grammatically complete and structured logically, and that the meaning of the message is clear to the user
- Check the translation of terms that are essential to the document and make sure that any untranslated terms have been requested to stay as such by the client
- Read through the document to make sure that there is no missing or excess information
- Because the translation is part of the localization process, make sure that the content is not offensive or culturally insensitive
- Remember that the fewer post-edits there are the better – use as much of the original MT output as possible
- Correct spelling errors and make sure that the document is correctly punctuated and well formatted
And that’s it! For errors such as misspellings or formatting mistakes, you can use KantanMT’s PEX technology to find and correct any repetitive errors throughout a document. This will help to speed up post-editing times while reducing post-editing costs.
TAUS Machine Translation Post-Editing Guidelines
You can find out more about KantanMT by visiting KantanMT.com and signing up to our free 14 day trial.