What effect does post-editing have on the translation product from an end-user's perspective?

Abstract

This article details a triangulated eye-tracking experiment carried out at Cardiff University, UK. The experiment sought to compare the quality of final texts, from an end-user's perspective, when different translation modalities (translating and post-editing Machine Translation) were used to translate the same source text. The language pair investigated is English and Welsh. An eye tracker was used to record fixations in a between-groups experimental design as participants read two texts, one post-edited and one translated using the same source text, as well as two subjective Likert-type scales where each participant rated the texts for readability and comprehensibility. Following an analysis of fixation duration, the gaze data of the two groups was found to be statistically identical, and there was no statistically significant difference found between the readability and comprehensibility scores gleaned from subjective Likert-type scales. It is argued following this that post-editing machine translated texts does not necessarily lead to translations of inferior quality in the context of the final end-user, and that this further supports the use of Machine Translation in a professional context.