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Multiword Units in Machine Translation and Translation Technology
Edited by Ruslan Mitkov, Johanna Monti, Gloria Corpas Pastor and Violeta Seretan
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 341] 2018
► pp. 61–80

How do students cope with machine translation output of multiword units? An exploratory study

In this chapter, we take a closer look at students’ post-editing of multiword units (MWUs) from English into Dutch. The data consists of newspaper articles post-edited by translation students as collected by means of advanced keystroke logging tools.

We discuss the quality of the machine translation (MT) output for various types of MWUs, and compare this with the final post-edited quality. In addition, we examine the external resources consulted for each type of MWU. Results indicate that contrastive MWUs are harder to translate for the MT system, and harder to correct by the student post-editors than non-contrastive MWUs. We further find that consulting a variety of external resources helps student post-editors solve MT problems.

Keywords: machine translation, post-editing, search strategies, external resources, multiword units, translation process, translation quality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Experimental set-up
  • 3.Analysis
  • 4.Conclusion
  • 5.Future work
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.341.03dae
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