The potential and limits of lay post-editing in an online community

This paper aims at exploring the potential of a lay community as post-editors. It focusses on 15 members of an online technology support forum, native speakers of the target language (TL) and some knowledge of the source language (SL) translating content that was machine translated from English into German specific to their own domain. It presents the most predominant errors remaining in the post-edited output and the impact of these on the quality of the post-edited output as measured by domain specialists evaluating adequacy and fluency. This paper further explores examples of these errors and possible solutions to reducing the occurrence of these and maximising the community’s potential. The targeted post-editing quality was “‘good enough”, as determined in the postediting guidelines. The PE results demonstrate that there is still room for improvement in terms of quality.