Investigating post-editing effort

Abstract The working environment of translators has changed significantly in recent decades, with post-editing (PE) emerging as a new trend in the human translation workflow, particularly following the advent of neural machine translation (NMT) and the improvement of the quality of the machine translation (MT) raw output especially at the level of fluency. In addition, the directionality axiom is increasingly being questioned with translators working from and into their first language both in the context of translation (Buchweitz and Alves 2006; Pavlović and Jensen 2009; Fonseca and Barbosa 2015; Hunziker Heeb 2015; Ferreira 2013, 2014; Ferreira et al. 2016; Feng 2017) and in the context of PE (Garcia 2011; Sánchez-Gijón and Torres-Hostench 2014; da Silva et al. 2017; Toledo Báez 2018). In this study we employ product- and process-oriented approaches to investigate directionality in PE in the English-Greek language pair. In particular, we compare the cognitive, temporal, and technical effort expended by translators for the full PE of NMT output in L1 (Greek) with the effort required for the full PE of NMT output in L2 (English), while we also analyze the quality of the final translation product. Our findings reveal that PE in L2, i.e., inverse PE, is less demanding than PE in L1, i.e., direct PE, in terms of the time and keystrokes required, and the cognitive load exerted on translators. Finally, our research shows that directionality does not imply differences in quality.