Risk management and post-editing competence

Abstract

Post-editing machine translation has become an important part of the translation industry in recent years. Although some aspects of the post-editing (PE) task are similar to translation from scratch, some considerations concerning the task and competences required of the post-editor differ. In this article, we want to focus on three important aspects of PE. First, we want to relate translation risk management considerations to the PE task. Based on this, we want to introduce a decision model for PE jobs that will help to decide whether a translation job should be done with machine translation (MT) systems, which includes factors like text type, the MT system, the required quality of the final text, turnaround time and life span of the translation. Although these decisions often have to be made by customers or project managers, they also indicate various competences required of a post-editor, which differ to some degree from competences that a translator or reviser needs. Hence, after revising existing translation and revision competence models, we will outline our own post-editing competence model.