Revisiting Post-Editing for E nglish- C hinese Machine Translation (2025)

Abstract: Given the rapid strides in quality made by automated translation since the advent of Neural Machine Translation, questions regarding the need and role of Post-Editing (PE) may need revisiting. This paper discusses this in light of a survey of opinions from two cohorts of post-graduate students of translation. The responses indicate that the role of PE may need further elaboration in terms of aspects such as grammar, lexis and style, with lexis and style being the main sites requiring human intervention. Also, contrary to expectations, responses generally show marked hesitation in considering quasi-texts as final without PE even in case of disposable texts. The discussion here pertains to English-Chinese translation, but may resonate with other language pairs as well.

## introduction post-editing or simply editing as a phenomenon may have existed ever since writing and the need to revise came into existence. however, the concept this paper is concerned with is machine translation post-editing (mtpe) where "...the task of the post-editor is to edit, modify and/or correct pre-translated text that has been processed by an mt system from a source language into (a) target language(s)." @xcite the manner in which post-editing was conducted evolved from the paper and pencil work to editing on a word-processor and eventually through interactive software systems @xcite . mtpe further came to be classified broadly in terms of the extent of editing and targeted quality into minimal post-editing (for inbound purposes) and maximal post-editing (for publication and outbound purposes) @xcite . given the relatively lower quality of unedited or quasi-texts @xcite produced by mt, early discussions considered using unedited texts for "gisting" or as a pre-translation for screening @xcite . later, international standards were evolved for mtpe such as the international standards organization's (iso 18587:2017 translation services -post-editing of machine translation output -requirements, 2017) that classifies mtpe into light post-editing and full post-editing. according to this standard, light post-editing is a "process of post-editing (3.1.4) to obtain a merely comprehensible text without any attempt to produce a product comparable to a product obtained by human translation (3.4.3)"; full post-editing on the other hand refers to "process of post-editing (3.1.4) to obtain a product comparable to a product obtained by human translation (3.4.3)". the definition of light post-editing here is akin to what allen terms "rapid post-editing" where "a strictly minimal number of corrections on documents that usually contain perishable information" @xcite . it must be mentioned here that this standard was created in 2017 and it is currently under review. detailed guidelines for mtpe are also provided by the translation and automation user society (taus), which makes a similar distinction between light and full pe but suggests creating "a clear matrix of post-editing productivity, quality, turnaround time and pricing discount expectation" based on a detailed analysis @xcite . taus guidelines also provide for the possibility of "good enough" quality that involve ensuring ## post-editing in the era of nmt and ai with specific reference to english-chinese translation, as early as 2018 there were claims of mt having achieved parity with human translation (ht) in domains such as news translation @xcite , though evidence for human translation being superior were also presented @xcite . the quality of raw output from machine translation has increased across domains and recent studies have shown that translations produced by mtpe "were more accurate than the outputs from ht [human translation] both for sts of high and low complexity" @xcite , even though the authors do not report a strong co-relation between perceived and actual difficulty measurement when comparing mtpe and ht. a 2021 study involving chinese translator trainees also demonstrated increased speed and reduced effort on the part of translators @xcite when using mtpe. as previously mentioned, even if quasi-texts produced by mt are not considered entirely free of errors, in the interests of efficiency and particularly for general everyday communication, there have always been suggestions that raw mt output may be suitable for gisting or may simply undergo light post-editing to eliminate critical errors. given the advanced in mt quality today, it may be assumed that the possibility of using mt without editing should be higher, at least for some purposes. a recent study that revisited definitions of light post-editing and full post-editing suggested that these definitions may no longer be valid and instead advocates redefining mtpe guidelines based on an ecosystem incorporating all aspects that influence a translator's decision making @xcite . the question now is to what extent have the strides made by mt resulted in reduced necessity for pe? given the improvements in quality, does the distinction between light and full pe continue to hold good? in the following we discuss how postgraduate trainee translators perceive the quality produced by mt in general and the nature and role of pe in particular. for this purpose, a survey of opinions was conducted with two successive cohorts (academic year 2022/23 and 2023/24) of post-graduate students of translation as respondents. ## survey the survey employed a questionnaire (see appendix a) with responses graded according to the likert scale. in the data presented below the responses are assigned scores from 0 to 4 (0 for 'strongly disagree', 1 for 'disagree', 2 for 'neutral', 3 for 'agree' and 4 for 'strongly agree). the survey was tested and adjusted for clarity. in terms of reliability, using the survey data on spss a cronbach alpha score of 0.860 and 0.872 was obtained for 2023 and 2024 respectively, which suggest good internal consistency. the data presented below shows responses from two cohorts of students from the master of arts in translation studies programme at the university of macau. each cohort is made of 25-30 students, of whom 20 from 2024 and 21 from 2023 responded to the survey. a majority of students admitted to the programme come from different parts of mainland china, while roughly a quarter come from macao sar. all students go through a rigorous assessment of language proficiency and preparation before admission. all respondents reported falling under the 20-30 years age group with 10-15 years of formal education in english and 15-20 years of formal education in chinese on average. all students have chinese (putonghua or cantonese) as their primary language and english as their second or acquired language. the students attended a compulsory course titled "translation technology" that discussed definitions of mtpe in detail and also trained students to carry out light pe and full pe. they were asked to respond to survey questions based on their experience of post-editing translations both from chinese to english and english to chinese for different genres of writing. the purpose of the survey was to understand how postgraduate students of translation perceived the role of mtpe in terms of need and scope. the purpose behind repeating the survey over two years was to see if there were significant changes in the attitudes and perception conveyed given the normalization of mt use that is expected to occur with time. the survey questionnaire was divided into three parts: questions regarding efficiency and quality of mtpe (1a-1d), questions regarding types of mtpe required (meaning aspects that most require pe, 2a-2l), and necessity of pe for mt produced for different purposes (3a-3f). the mean scores for each question are shown in figures 1 and 2 below: ## conclusion based on the survey results, it seems that the quality now achieved by mt is indeed considered relatively superior in terms of grammar. however, lexical and stylistic errors remain sites requiring post-editing by translation. as regards the distinction between light and full post-editing, responses do not emphatically support the idea that light pe may be sufficient for any translation that is to be published and also suggest that time and effort in light vs full pe continue to be significantly different. this seems to run counter to findings in other studies that find this distinction increasingly difficult to make. finally, much reservation is expressed in doing away with pe. this is true in case of outbound texts, but also in case of inbound and disposable texts, albeit to a relatively lesser extent. the results suggest that pe is still considered essential for mt and that there remains a distinction between the extent of pe in spite of the progress achieved by mt. given the small size of respondents, it must be acknowledged that more large-scale surveys and those including other language pairs as well as professional translators would be necessary to corroborate these inferences. it is also important to acknowledge that the fact that the respondents are training to become professional translators may have contributed to a bias and the hesitation reported. studies have reported negative pre-task perceptions of mt contributing to lower quality and productivity in output @xcite . the lack of experience in working with frameworks that clearly define requirements of quality and efficiency may also result in a conservative approach towards mt. this has been observed in previous studies @xcite and may affect responses of students.