Toral, Antonio, Wieling, Martijn and Way, Andy ORCID: 0000-0001-5736-5930 (2018) Post-editing effort of a novel with statistical and neural machine translation. Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 5 (9). pp. 1-11. ISSN 2297-2668
Abstract
We conduct the first experiment in the literature in which a novel is translated
automatically and then post-edited by professional literary translators. Our case study
is Warbreaker, a popular fantasy novel originally written in English, which we translate
into Catalan. We translated one chapter of the novel (over 3,700 words, 330 sentences)
with two data-driven approaches to Machine Translation (MT): phrase-based statistical
MT (PBMT) and neural MT (NMT). Both systems are tailored to novels; they are trained
on over 100 million words of fiction. In the post-editing experiment, six professional
translators with previous experience in literary translation translate subsets of this chapter
under three alternating conditions: from scratch (the norm in the novel translation
industry), post-editing PBMT, and post-editing NMT. We record all the keystrokes, the
time taken to translate each sentence, as well as the number of pauses and their duration.
Based on these measurements, and using mixed-effects models, we study post-editing
effort across its three commonly studied dimensions: temporal, technical and cognitive.
We observe that both MT approaches result in increases in translation productivity: PBMT
by 18%, and NMT by 36%. Post-editing also leads to reductions in the number of
keystrokes: by 9% with PBMT, and by 23% with NMT. Finally, regarding cognitive effort,
post-editing results in fewer (29 and 42% less with PBMT and NMT, respectively) but
longer pauses (14 and 25%).
Metadata
Item Type: | Article (Published) |
---|---|
Refereed: | Yes |
Additional Information: | The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fdigh. 2018.00009/full#supplementary-material |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | literary translation; post-editing; neural machine translation; statistical machine translation; foreign literature; foreign fiction |
Subjects: | Computer Science > Machine translating |
DCU Faculties and Centres: | UNSPECIFIED |
Publisher: | Frontiers Media |
Official URL: | http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2018.00009 |
Copyright Information: | © 2018 The Authors |
Use License: | This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. View License |
ID Code: | 23364 |
Deposited On: | 27 May 2019 15:29 by Thomas Murtagh . Last Modified 30 May 2019 13:23 |
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