Should we be polishing up our post editing skills?

 

Should we be polishing up our post editing skills?

The technological revolution has crept into the translation industry and is showing no signs of leaving anytime soon. In fact, its capabilities only seem to be increasing as time moves on. 

But perhaps instead of running scared every time we hear of technological advancement in our sector, we should take some time to get acquainted with these new mod-cons  in order to better prepare ourselves and the industry as a whole for the future. Anyway let's face it, it still has some way to go before it achieves parity with human translators.

Unless you’re new to the world of translation, you’ve probably experienced first-hand a significant increase in post-editing job requests over the last few years. In order to save both time and money, more and more companies are inclined to use this technology for their translation projects.

Put simply, post-editing is the editing and linguistic correction of a text processed by a machine translation engine. That is to say, the aim of the process (or rather, the job of the post-editor) is to eliminate any trace of a machine translation from the text and make it as ‘natural’ as possible.

Sounds easy? Think again. The issue is that right now the quality of machine translation engines varies massively. That means that for post-editors it’s difficult to judge how long it will take you to get through a text. 

There are occasions when you’ll essentially have to re-translate from start to finish, and others when there’ll be nothing more than a few grammatical mistakes.

If the text is not actually intended for publication and has instead been translated to get a sense of the overall meaning, light-post editing is often used. For this type of project, only major mistakes that impact the reader’s ability to understand the text are corrected. 

This in itself can be challenging for a translator as in some cases spelling, grammatical, and even punctuation mistakes may not be corrected.

That said, many translators continue to second guess themselves when it comes to post-editing. Why, we hear you ask? Quite simply because the majority have never received any formal training in the skill itself.

It is a new discipline that requires practice and precision and that, in addition, is not currently taught as part of many (if any!) university courses. There is also very little literature available on post-editing as opposed to translation, making it difficult for newcomers to break into the field with any sort of real confidence.

So what are we to do? For now, it seems we’ll have to rely on the help and advice of translation forums and industry colleagues, which are great sources of knowledge. That is of course unless you hit it lucky and find an agency that offers some basic training to help you get to grips with this new skill.

Whatever your opinion on technology may be, gaining some understanding of how the whole post-editing process works will surely benefit your career in the long term. 

Written by Helen Hadley