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Post-editing and pre-editing

Machine translation saves time and money, but also quality. However, there is a middle ground: Make the most of pre- and post-editing! This saves you translation costs but still achieves high quality through machine translation.

What is pre-editing?

Pre-editing consists of editing the texts before the machine translation. As a rule, errors in the source text are corrected (mainly grammar, punctuation and spelling), ambiguities are eliminated and structures are simplified. Statistical machine translation (MT) may also involve adjusting the text so that the input text better matches the texts the machine was trained on, which can improve the MT machine's performance. Therefore, pre-editing helps you to obtain linguistically better and more correct MT texts.  

 

What is post-editing?

In post-editing, professionally trained translators or linguists check and correct the MT output in order to eliminate both semantic and linguistic errors. Post-editing can be roughly divided into two categories: easy / fast and complete post-editing. The first category focuses on conveying the correct meaning while ignoring stylistic issues. On the other hand, in a full post-editing scenario, the text should reach a level of quality comparable to that of a human translation and all issues must be addressed.

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