A perfect translation. Does it exist? What does it look like? Often translators are faced with the issue of pressing deadlines which rob them of the opportunity to “polish” their translations and make them excellent. In a perfect world, translators should be able to deliver only the translations which they deem truly finished. Like a polished diamond.
A tool or an asset?
Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world, but one thing we can do is introduce you to post-editing, which is bound to make life easier for both translators and translation service customers. During post-editing, the translator, in essence, makes corrections to a pre-translated text, which means that it leaves them with more time to concentrate on the fine points and details, polishing the translation to a point of perfection so that it sounds natural. This way, translators can get more done in a shorter period of time, leaving more time for them to spend on hobbies or with friends and family. Post-editing provides significant benefits to the client as well, as they can expect large volumes of text to be translated in much shorter time and at a reasonable price, without compromising on quality.
Recommendations for a successful outcome
As machine translation post-editing is still a fairly new service for translators, translation agencies and their clients alike, there are some basic things we should all keep in mind.
- Firstly, post-editing should be seen as standard editing work. The text produced by the machine should be polished and proofread in the same way as if a human being made the translation. It could contain omissions, inconsistent terminology, or lack the accuracy necessary in some of the more specialised fields. This is the added value of a human post-editor, who also works to improve the style of the finished text.
- Secondly, it is critical to assess what type of text the original source is. Not all texts are suitable for machine translation, and especially when it comes to ads, marketing or other types of emotionally loaded, cultural reference-based or sensitive texts, machine translation quickly loses its usefulness. Machine translation is great for translating texts whose main purpose is to inform. These include various instructions, policies, regulations, guidelines, which are often large documents, and in such cases post-editing will be a great help in saving both the translator’s and the client’s time.
- Thirdly, machine translation should never be delivered without post-editing. Also, use of relevant termbases and technical support is crucial to any machine translation and post-editing job, for example, Linearis uses a specially developed neural network technology tailored to the needs of its clients.
Multiple benefits
Only by taking all of these factors into account we can get the most out of post-editing, i.e. higher efficiency and productivity, faster turnaround times, satisfied clients and, the icing on the cake, more free time for our vendors!
Contact our experts now and find out how post-editing can improve work and productivity in your field or company.
