Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the concept of 'post-editing effort' and challenges the misconception that post-editing is 'easier' than translating. The aim is to safeguard translators' fair working conditions and professional status in the increasingly technologised industry environment.

Paper long abstract:

As AI and machine learning technologies advance and the quality of machine translation (MT) continuously improves, a machine translation post-editing (MTPE) production model is becoming prevalent amongst language service providers (LSPs). MTPE aims to increase translation productivity by fixing errors in MT outputs, rather than having texts translated by human translators from scratch. While increased automation and the resultant improvement in productivity is welcome in an ever-competitive translation industry, the increasingly technologised new working environment is causing a feeling of anxiety amongst translators, as they feel their professional expertise and competences are undermined and their work is not fairly recognised and rewarded.

This paper explores and re-evaluates the concept of 'post-editing effort' involved in MTPE. The aim of the investigation is to find out how this effort can validly be measured for the purpose of devising a fair pricing model of MTPE for post-editors, who are often also translators. The paper challenges the misconception often held by industry stakeholders that fixing MT output is 'easier' than translating from scratch (thus requiring less effort). I argue that this misconception is reflected in current MTPE pricing models, resulting in a feeling of unfairness amongst translators and post-editors. This is an issue of ethics, as a misunderstanding of the mechanism of post-editing and its pricing can lead to the exploitation of translators and post-editors, which can affect their motivation, professional esteem and career prospects, deprive their agency and can ultimately cause their disempowerment in the translation production system. The study approaches this question from two angles: the first from the sociological point of view drawing on the interview data collected from LSP workers in Japan, and the second from the cognitive studies' view, reviewing process studies literature on post-editing efforts in different languages.