Machine translation for litterature: a pilot study (Traduction automatisée d'une oeuvre littéraire: une étude pilote) [in French]

Current machine translation (MT ) techniques are continuously improving. In specific areas, post-editing (PE) allows to obtain high-quality translations relatively quickly. But is such a pipeline (MT+PE) usable to translate a literary work (fiction, short story) ? This paper tries to bring a preliminary answer to this question. A short story by American writer Richard Powers, still not available in French, is automatically translated and post-edited and then revised by nonprofessional translators. The LIG post-editing platform allows to read and edit the short story suggesting (for the future) a community of readers-editors that continuously improve the translations of their favorite author. In addition to presenting experimental evaluation results of the pipeline MT+PE (MT system used, auomatic evaluation), we also discuss the quality of the translation output from the perspective of a panel of readers (who read the translated short story in French, and answered to a survey afterwards). Finally, some remarks of the official french translator of R. Powers, requested on this occasion, are given at the end of this article. Mots-clés : traduction automatique, TA, oeuvre littéraire, post-édition.