How to teach machine translation post-editing? Experiences from a post-editing course

Advances of machine translation technology have in recent years increased its use in various contexts. In the translation industry, work processes involving the use of machine translated texts as a raw translation to be post-edited by a translator are becoming increasingly common. The increasing use of post-editing processes also raises questions related to teaching and training of translators and post-editors, and institutions offering translator training have started to incorporate post-editing in their curricula. This paper describes a machine translation and post-editing course arranged at the University of Helsinki in Fall 2014. From the teacher’s perspective, we discuss experiences of planning and teaching of the post-editing course. The development of the students’ experiences and perception of the course contents, machine translation technology and post-editing are also discussed based on reflective essays written by the students after the course.