Working with Pre-translated Texts: Preliminary Findings from a Survey on Post-editing and Revision Practices in S wiss Corporate In-house Language Services (2022)

Abstract: With the arrival of neural machine translation, the boundaries between revision and post-editing (PE) have started to blur (Koponen et al., 2020). To shed light on current professional practices and provide new pedagogical perspectives, we set up a survey-based study to investigate how PE and revision are carried out in professional settings. We received 86 responses from corporate translators working at 26 different corporate in-house language services in Switzerland. Although the differences between the two activities seem to be clear for in-house linguists, our findings show that they tend to use the same reading strategies when working with human-translated and machine-translated texts.

## introduction in recent years, quality improvements achieved by the latest-generation machine translation systems have put machine translation (mt) under the spotlight. results of recent language industry surveys @xcite show that language service providers (lsps) identify mt post-editing (pe) as one of the most requested services and as an opportunity to increase productivity and improve profit margins. therefore, many of them have implemented mt or plan to do so as soon as possible. in switzerland, a multilingual country where many companies have their own in-house translation service, the situation is no different. many lsps have already added mt to their workflows and started offering pe among their services, together with translation and revision. since neural mt (nmt) output more closely resembles human translations than machinetranslated texts @xcite , correcting it is often considered more similar to a revision. recent work by @xcite has paved the way for studying the relationship between these two activities whose boundaries are "starting to blur" (2020:3). to shed light on current practices and provide new perspectives for the training of both students and experienced translators who work with mt, we set up a survey-based study to investigate how pe and revision are carried out in professional settings. in particular, we chose to focus on switzerland-based corporate in-house language services (cils), as this cohort is underrepresented in language industry surveys and has been scarcely investigated compared to institutional @xcite @xcite and freelance translators @xcite . our study consisted of two questionnaires, available in four languages: the first questionnaire (q1) was aimed at language service directors and project managers and contained questions about the structure and workflow of the language service. the second questionnaire (q2) was aimed at language service employees who translate, revise and post-edit texts. it included questions about their workflows, strategies and attitudes towards pe and revision. in the present article, we will delve into the design and the results of the q2 foot_0 . the aim of this questionnaire was to investigate how corporate in-house linguists carry out revision and pe in terms of (i) reading strategies -whether they read the source or target text first -and (ii) overall strategies, e.g. whether they follow specific parameters or guidelines. additionally, we also investigated whether linguists apply the same strategies when revising texts that have been translated or post-edited by another person. to the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey explicitly comparing revision and pe practices of professional translators in switzerland. the remainder of the paper is structured as follows: section 2 details previous survey-based studies that dealt with revision and pe practices, respectively, as well as studies on similar topics conducted in switzerland. section 3 describes the survey design, while results are analysed in section 4. section 5 includes some final remarks and pathways for future research. ## previous studies several researchers have used country-specific surveys to investigate revision practices. in belgium, @xcite launched two small-scale surveys (48 and 21 responses, respectively) among translation agencies to establish which translation revision procedures and revision methods (revising on paper and/or on-screen) are the most used. she found that while revisers use different procedures, most compare source and target texts to make corrections and then reread the target text one last time. results also suggest that revision is mainly carried out on screen. this latter aspect was also included in a surveybased study conducted by @xcite in the italian publishing sector. the study included two questionnaires: one for translators to investigate self-revision practices (55 participants) and one for revisers to investigate other revision practices (25 participants). results of the latter show that revision is mainly carried out on-screen, but the choice of the medium depends on various factors and on-screen is preferred if the translation needs many corrections. regarding revision methods, 60% of revisers do not read the whole source text before starting to revise, primarily due to "lack of time and cost-effectiveness" (2017:13). instead, participants claim they mostly compare source text and target text segment by segment. in denmark, @xcite surveyed 24 translation companies about their revision policies and conducted 13 follow-up interviews with survey respondents and in-house revisers in five of these companies. collected data suggest that not all texts are revised. this depends on different factors, including the translator who translated the text, assignment difficulty, text type/genre, intended use, and customer. the most used procedure is monolingual revision followed by a comparative revision or vice-versa. however, interviews reveal that revision is rarely fully comparative. most companies do have revision guidelines, but not in written form. in austria, schnierer (2020) surveyed translation companies to determine whether their revision practices complied with the former translation standard en15038 (currently replaced by iso 17100). she found that two out of six certified companies do not systematically revise translations, although the standard requires this. regarding revision methods, all companies report comparing the translation with the source text. in contrast, only one uncertified company reported performing monolingual revisions of the target text (referring to the source text if needed). five out of six certified companies use revision parameters, while this applies only to six out of thirteen uncertified companies. lastly, hernández @xcite conducted a survey among translation practitioners (115 respondents, primarily freelance translators) to find out about revision practices and perceptions of revision in france. two of her questions dealt with the revision of automatically pre-translated segments, i.e., those coming from a cat tool and machine translation, respectively. 69% of respondents state that they do not work with machine-translated texts, 23% claim they revise those texts in-depth, and 6% revise the text to ensure just its overall comprehension. in the author's thesis @xcite , both processes are referred to as post-editing. therefore, it is not clear whether respondents refer to post-editing or actual revision practices. when it comes to defining how the task is carried out, studies of revision practice outperform those on pe practice. in participant-oriented studies, pe discourse most often concerns adoption rates and attitudes toward the task @xcite @xcite @xcite . for instance, in a survey of the state of the linguist supply chain, researchers at common sense advisory @xcite reported that, out of 6,997 respondents, 55% use mt on most projects or whether the customer requests it. some studies focused on salaried translators as the target population @xcite but did not investigate how mt was introduced and integrated or how pe was carried out in terms of reading strategies, i.e., which text -source or target -is read first. to the best of our knowledge, the only study that deals with this topic is the one by ginovart @xcite , who surveyed european lsps, university lecturers and linguists about their mtpe practices and training protocols. results of the questionnaire sent to pe educators -detailed in ginovart cid and colominas (2020) -show that 49% of respondents do not provide their students with any advice on whether the source or the target segment should be read first, while 33% of instructors advise reading the source text first. it must be noted that the question was asked in a close-ended, single-answer format. therefore, other possibilities, e.g. reading the whole source or target text before starting to post-edit, are not explored. the question on reading strategies was also included in the questionnaire addressed to professional linguists, but the results are not discussed in any publication to date. ## results we initially received 107 responses, but we had to discard 18 of them for various reasons. five responses came from linguists who do not perform revision or pe in their daily jobs and were incomplete. six responses came from linguists working at companies who did not yet use mt in their production workflow. seven responses could not be traced back to any company that filled out the first questionnaire; this happened because we had only partial control over how the questionnaire was circulated (as explained in section 3.1). additionally, five valid responses were incomplete, but we decided to keep those who at least completed the first four sections of our survey (@xmath0. in total, we retained 86 valid responses from 23 swiss cils. if we consider the number of in-house linguists indicated by each company in questionnaire q1, we can calculate a response rate of 44%. however, we cannot compare this response rate with that of other surveys focusing on similar topics, mainly because we decided to address a specific group of stakeholders and focus on a geographical area that is scarcely represented. on average, 50% of linguists in each company have responded to the questionnaire q2. we did not receive any responses from linguists working in three out of 26 companies who currently use mt in production (as indicated in questionnaire q1). ## conclusion and further research we conducted a survey-based study to investigate revision and pe practices of salaried translators working at corporate in-house language services in switzerland. we found that, although revision and pe share some common grounds, most linguists claim to act differently depending on whether they work with human-translated or machine-translated texts. however, they often apply the same reading strategies to these texts in practice. while research on revision procedures has shown the impact of different revision strategies on revision quality, task duration and error detection potential @xcite @xcite , similar studies on pe strategies are extremely scarce. as a result, pe training rarely includes useful advice on how to carry out the task. our survey-based data show that, in pe, most in-house linguists start by reading the source segment and tend to apply the same strategy regardless of the text type, while there is less consensus on reading strategies in revision. nevertheless, it remains to be demonstrated whether using the same or different reading strategies in pe and revision could benefit linguists' performance or even influence their attitudes toward the task. the way many participants misunderstood a question about the possible influence of mt on revision procedures makes us think that there is a sort of cognitive bias toward a view of pe as the revision of mt. such bias could affect the behaviour of some linguists who could not perceive working with mt as a means to vary their daily tasks but rather as a mere increase in the number of revision jobs to carry out. displaying mt in a separate window (just as with translation memory fuzzy matches) instead of pre-translating the entire text could perhaps help linguists consider mt as a tool supporting their translation workflow -rather than a "translation dispenser" whose output must be corrected. translation scholars have often recommended introducing pe and revision as two separate activities at a later stage in the translation curriculum (guerberof @xcite @xcite , once some translation competence has been acquired. in modern translation environments, however, the use of nmt is changing the way we interact with pre-translated texts and we now need to conceive ad hoc activities to help translation students construct their own revision and pe strategies in parallel. findings detailed in the present article are preliminary. using the same survey, we also collected data on linguists' satisfaction in performing revision and pe. further research will include analysing these data to identify and address possible sources of grievance. we hope these additional data will help us draw a clearer picture of the similarities and differences between revision and pe in the nmt era. note: the project obtained the approval of the ethical review board of the faculty of translation and interpreting at the university of geneva (reference number 32/2021). acknowledgements: i gratefully acknowledge all the participants who took the time to fill out the questionnaires and answer my questions. i would also like to thank prof. pierrette bouillon, dr. marco civico, and the other colleagues who contributed to the making of this study with their comments. finally, i would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.