With the increasing adoption of machine translation technology such as AI translation tools, occasions where post-editing is needed are becoming more common.

Post-editing is the work of manually correcting the output of a machine translation to be something that more closely approaches manual translation. In contrast to previous translation methods where texts were translated from scratch, post-editing is a new method that involves correcting the output of machine translation.

The number of companies adopting machine translation post-editing in pursuit of better cost-performance is increasing, based on a philosophy that doing so will be more productive than manual translation.

There are also many cases where companies opt for post-editing as a compromise solution when requesting a translator due to concerns about the quality of the output of machine translation is impractical for time and cost reasons.

What Is the Difference Between Post-Editing and Translation

The key difference between manual translation and post-editing is that manual translation means that the work of translation is done by a person from the very beginning, while post-editing means that a person corrects a text output through machine translation.

Post-editing begins at the stage of checking a text output by machine translation. If there is no problem, the process ends with the translation check. If there are parts missing, or errors in the translation, the text is corrected to the desired level of translation through either a full or light post-edit, making use of the machine translation output.

On the other hand, translation is the work of re-writing language in another language that has a different background to the first. A key feature of translation is that it not only results in translation that is easier to read and uses more natural expressions, but it also reflects cultural and other factors in the content.

The differences between post-editing and translation appear not just in process, but also in the output of the work. Post-editing prioritizes saving work time, so the most important thing is that the meaning is correctly conveyed.

Translation, on the other hand, is focused on content. The key feature is a greater level of care compared to post-editing in terms of readability, desired tone relative to the content and reflecting cultural background and context.

The Role of Post-Editing and Machine Translation

The background to the rise of post-editing is the explosive growth and improved accuracy of machine translation tools in recent years. While the accuracy of AI translation tools has increased dramatically, they still lag human translation now. This creates the need for post-editing.

With the globalization of business, the occasions when translation is needed and the volume of it needed have increased. This has left existing internal resources short of the translation volume required at many companies and created problems where the time and budget needed for translation have become excessive.

The advantage of machine translation is that it is speedy. But there are also many cases where the accuracy of it does not meet the level of manual translation. Thus, to address the translation accuracy problem, post-editing following machine translation is an approach that has been adopted at many companies.

The role of translation is to convey a message. By adding the small amount of work represented by post-editing, you can convey the message you want to convey even with machine translation.

Key Points in Using and Ordering Post-Editing

Usage of easy-to-use machine translation tools is growing every year due to various reasons, such as manual translation taking too much time. While machine translation is speedy and convenient, there are also cases where the accuracy of machine translation is not up to the task. In such cases, performing post-editing to improve the accuracy of the output, can still lead to cases where the inaccuracy of the original machine translation means having to fully re-translate, ultimately costing just as much time as simply translating from scratch would have. For this reason, to minimize the time spent on post-editing, it is important to use high-accuracy machine translation tools.

While post-editing tends to be of lower accuracy compared to manual translation, when a certain level of quality is required, there are also methods available to improve the accuracy of the output such as pre-editing, beyond simply post-editing the output of machine translation tools beginning with AI translation. Pre-editing, which removes difficult-to-understand and unclear passages from source texts, adds in subjects, and divides up overlong sentences helps to improve the accuracy of machine translation output, resulting in a shorter amount of time needed for post-editing.

When ordering post-editing work, the presence of ISO 18587 post-editing certification also serves as a standard for determining the quality of the work.

Toin post-editing

At Toin, our highly experienced post-editors have advanced translation skills and knowledge about light post-editing and full post-editing and can quickly optimize machine-translated text according to your needs.
You can also make use of Toin’s AI translation tool.

■See here for more about Toin post-editing