Half-day practical course on post-editing

PART 1
After looking at various standard industry guidelines for light and full post-editing, half the attendees will translate short texts from various languages into English or vice versa and the other half will full-post-edit machine-translated versions of the same texts. The two groups will then come together in pairs according to language combination to compare the results, along with the speaker, both in terms of productivity increase and overall quality.

PART 2
In the second part of the Lab, all the attendees will receive a machine-translated text to post-edit from Italian or Spanish into English, or vice versa. While they are doing so, they will also be asked to use any knowledge they may have of how machine translation works to attempt a preliminary categorization of the errors they find. The speaker will then present an analysis of the errors in the raw outputs, as well as other typical errors which occur, in order to provide practical tips for post-editors. Most of the error types analysed are language-independent and attendees who do not normally work with Spanish or Italian but are familiar with a Neo-Latin language are still likely to find the practical exercise useful.

Getting to grips with post-editing machine translation

To meet the growing demand for translation, post-editing of machine translation output (PEMT) is being increasingly adopted as a mainstream alternative working method. The compelling reason behind this trend is the widely reported increase in productivity compared to human translation together with a comparable and sometimes higher quality level. The skills required for post-editing are different from those needed for the editing of author-written texts and different from those required for translation. This workshop aims to familiarize attendees with post-editing methods by analysing the typical mistakes of both neural and statistical machine translation (MT). It also provides some insight into why certain errors occur in raw MT output through a presentation of the historical development of the technology. It will conclude with a discussion of when PEMT should and should not be used and how raw MT output can be improved through preparatory steps.

Tutto quello che avresti voluto sempre sapere sul post-editing ma che avevi paura di chiedere*

Ovvero un esempio del perché serve il post-editor in un solo titolo

Programma

• • Breve storia della traduzione automatica
  • Come funzionano le cose: la traduzione automatica
    (ovvero la traduzione automatica per negati)
  • Linee guida per il post-editing
  • Sfida tra post-editing e traduzione umana
  • La puzza di traduzione automatica
  • Individuazione e classificazione degli errori della traduzione automatica
  • Tecniche per migliorare la qualità dell’output grezzo

Sono previsti due esperimenti pratici dall’inglese all’italiano da eseguire con il proprio portatile/tablet, che i partecipanti sono invitati a portare con sé (eventualmente con cavi di alimentazione). Non è richiesto alcun software particolare oltre a un comune word processor, ma serve almeno una discreta conoscenza della lingua inglese.

* Il titolo principale è l’output grezzo di un noto motore di traduzione automatica neurale, senza post-editing..