Undergraduate Translation Students’ Performance and Attitude vis-à- vis Machine Translation and Post-editing: Does Training Play a Role?

In an effort to meet the demands in speed, productivity and low-cost, the translation industry has turned to Machine Translation (MT) and Post-editing (PE). Nowadays, MT output is used as raw translation to be further post-edited by a translator (Lommel and DePalma, 2016). Yet, translators still approach PE with caution and scepticism and question its real benefits (Koponen 2012; Gaspari et al 2014; Moorkens 2018). In addition, attitudes to MT and PE seem to affect PE effort and performance (Witczak, 2016; Çetiner and İşisağ, 2019). Under that light, this study aims to investigate the attitudes and perceptions of undergraduate translation students towards MT and PE and their performance before and after they receive training in MT and PE. Questionnaires are used to capture their attitudes and perceptions, a calculation of the technical effort and the temporal effort expended by the students while post-editing is also used, while a human evaluation of the post-edited output is carried out to assess their performance and the quality of the post-edited texts. The analysis reveals a change in the students’ attitudes and perceptions; they report a more positive attitude toward MT and PE, they are more confident and faster, while they avoid over-editing.