Productivity and quality in the post-editing of outputs from translation memories and machine translation

Machine-translated segments are increasingly included as fuzzy matches within the translation-memory systems in the localisation workflow. This study presents preliminary results on the correlation between these two types of segments in terms of productivity and final quality. In order to test these variables, we set up an experiment with a group of eight professional translators using an on-line post-editing tool and a statistical-based machine translation engine. The translators were asked to translate new, machine-translated and translation-memory segments from the 80-90 percent value range using a post-editing tool without actually knowing the origin of each segment, and to complete a questionnaire. The findings suggest that translators have higher productivity and quality when using machine-translated output than when processing fuzzy matches from translation memories. Furthermore, translators' technical experience seems to have an impact on productivity but not on quality.