A Practical Approach to Using Machine Translation Software

AbstractHuman-Aided Machine Translation (HAMT) relies on the traditional roles of pre-editing, interaction and post-editing. ‘Post-editing’ is an activity generally understood to involve revision of the output ‘in the light of errors’ made by the system. This article proposes a new type of activity which involves changing the source text in the light of errors made by the software in order to improve the performance of the system. This activity involves adjusting the ‘input’ (rather than output) to the system and combines the possibility of controlling the errors that an MT system produces by manipulating its input (the source text) with the possibility of reacting to the errors once they have been seen, which is normally thought of as post-editing. The novelty lies in ‘post-editing’ the input, not the output. Some examples illustrating this approach are given and the implications for improving the efficiency of HAMT systems are discussed.