Assessing the Post-Editing Effort for Automatic and Semi-Automatic Translations of DVD Subtitles

With the increasing demand for fast and accurate audiovisual translation, subtitlers are starting to consider the use of translation technologies to support their work. An important issue that arises from the use of such technologies is measuring how much effort needs to be put in by the subtitler in post-editing (semi-)automatic translations. In this paper we present an objective way of measuring post-editing effort in terms of time. In experiments with English-Portuguese subtitles, we measure the post-editing effort of texts translated using machine translation and translation memory systems. We also contrast this effort against that of translating the texts without any tools. Results show that post-editing is on average 40% faster than translating subtitles from scratch. With our best system, more than 69% of the translations require little or no postediting.