Post Editing White Paper - The role and perspective of the Post - Editor: what are the training challenges?

Post-Editing is an increasingly popular language service that emerged along with machine-translation (MT) technology to meet the rising demand for translation services, as a cost-effective and time-efficient solution. Post-Editing consists in applying necessary corrections to MT output in order to ensure linguistic quality and consequently improve MT engine performance. Although it has been largely adopted in the translation industry and it is now deemed as a service in its own right, there is still a fair amount of skepticism towards it, due to, as this paper aims to show, a lack of specialized, universally adopted guidelines and training. The present analysis is intended to explore the specific skills and competences required to perform Post-Editing tasks and to link said skills to the concept of effort, as developed by Krings (2001), in order to define this nascent role. It goes on to present current attitudes and perspectives related to Post-Editing, in an attempt to reveal the source of skepticism towards it within the community of language professionals. Furthermore, the present paper is going to demonstrate the challenges involved in setting up a comprehensive Post-Editing training protocol and attempt to define its content, supported by empirical research results, as reflected in a digital survey among language industry professionals (Gene, 2020). The survey was conducted in the context of a Post-Editing Webinar and its sample comprised representatives of LSPs (Language Service Providers). The results hereby presented reflect the answers of 51 MLVs (Multilanguage Vendors) and 12 SLVs (Single Language Vendors) representatives.