: Comprehension accuracy, work time, and accuracy rate scores were determined for openbook tests of comprehension of hand translations and edited and unedited machine translations of representative areas of Russian scientific and technical documents in Physics, Earth Sciences, and Electrical Engineering. A total of 390 graduate students with at least a Master's degree background and 36 professional workers with a Master's degree and at least three years of field experience were used in the study. For general comprehensibility, hand translations were generally superior to unedited machine translations, but these differences were less consistent. Similar patterns were found in comprehension of categories of questions which differed in terms of: abstractness, the kind of content to which questions referred, the presence of transliterated cognate words in the text, and scope. Performance of graduate students in Physics and Earth Sciences using machine translations who did not read Russian did not differ from the performance of graduate students who did read Russian or from the performance of professional workers. Similarly, Russian reader and Professional worker groups did not differ. (Author)

This study used special reading-comprehension tests to compare the speed and accuracy with which the same Russian technical articles in physics, earth sciences, and electrical engineering could be read by technically sophisticated readers when they were presented in English translated from the original Russian by machine only, by machine plus postediting, and by normal manual procedures. Thus, the emphasis was on the transmission of the technical message rather than on linguistic characteristics. In general, the results consistently showed that manual translations exceeded post-edited translations, which exceeded machine translations across all three disciplines and various types of questions. Losses in speed and efficiency were substantially greater than in accuracy, and differences between machine alone and post-edited generally exceeded differences between post-edited and manual translations. However, it was concluded that machine-alone translations were surprisingly good and well worth further consideration under the proper circumstances.