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Part of
Innovation and Expansion in Translation Process Research
Edited by Isabel Lacruz and Riitta Jääskeläinen
[American Translators Association Scholarly Monograph Series XVIII] 2018
► pp. 217–240

Chapter 10
An experimental investigation of stages of processing in post-editing

This paper presents empirical evidence for the existence of distinctive stages in the post-editing process. We compare two behavioral tasks that are expected to differentiate between stages. We present reaction time data from a translation verification task experiment and key logging metrics from a post-editing experiment. These metrics provide information about the effort exerted during the processing of correct segments, segments with a mechanical error, and segments with a transfer error. Each metric reveals a different pattern of effort across the three error conditions. From this information, we infer the existence of distinct stages in the post-editing process.
Keywords: post-editing, stages, processing, cognitive effort, translation verification, pause-to-word ratio, transfer errors, mechanical errors
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Contrasting theoretical frameworks
  • Stages of processing in post-editing
  • Rationale
  • Experiment 1: Translation verification
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Materials
      • Procedure
      • Apparatus
    • Results and discussion
      • Results
      • Discussion
  • Rationale for Experiment 2
  • Experiment 2: Post-editing
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Materials
      • Procedure
      • Apparatus
    • Results and discussion
      • Results: First pause duration
      • Discussion: First pause duration
      • Results: Processing time per word
      • Discussion: Processing time per word
      • Results: Pause to word ratio
      • Discussion: Pause to word ratio
  • General discussion and conclusions
  • References
Published online: 1 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ata.18.10lac
References (34)
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