Translation Quality and Effort: Options versus Post-editing

Past research has shown that various types of computer assistance can reduce translation effort and improve translation quality over manual translation. This paper directly compares two common assistance types – selection from lists of translation options, and postediting of machine translation (MT) output produced by Google Translate – across two significantly different subject domains for Chinese-to-English translation. In terms of translation effort, we found that the use of options can require less technical effort than MT post-editing for a domain that yields lowerquality MT output. In terms of translation quality, our analysis suggests that individual preferences play a more decisive role than assistance type: a translator tends to consistently work better either with options or with MT post-editing, regardless of domain and of their translation ability.