MT -Pese: Machine Translation and Post-Editese (2022)

Abstract: This paper introduces the MT-Pese project, which aims at researching the post-editese phenomena in machine translated texts. We describe a range of experiments performed in order to gauge the effect of post-editese in dif-ferent domains, backtranslation, and quality.

## translationese and post-editese a number of studies @xcite have shown evidence of the so-called translationese phenomena @xcite , that is, statistical differences between translated texts and nontranslated texts. recently, post-editing (pe) of machine-translated (mt) texts has secured its space in the translation workflow for a variety of domains, and consequently, the research interest for the typical features of human-translated texts has shifted for the typical features of post-edited texts. however, results of studies searching for typical features of post-edited texts -what has been called "post-editese -have presented mixed results, that is, while some studies found evidence for the existence of post-editese (e.g. @xcite , other studies did not find evidence of the phenomena (e.g. @xcite . the aim of the mt-pese project is to investigate the post-editese phenomena on mt pe texts, using the rationale behind the translationese features as proposed by @xcite : simplification, explicitation, normalisation (or conservatism) and levelling out (or convergence). we define post-editese as the difference between the characteristics of human-translated texts (ht) and the pe versions, in relation to the raw mt output. mt-pese has researched what influences the features of post-editese in two different textual domains, namely, news and literature @xcite . we found that the literature domain contained more post-editese features. in a further study, we looked into the post-editese features in two different genres within the literature domain @xcite . currently, the project is focused on investigating the features of post-editese on backtranslations (bt), with the aim to identify, for instance, if bt of pe versions would still carry strong post-editese features. finally, the project also aims at addressing the question of whether the features of post-editese could be related to mt quality (section 4). ## post-editese in literary translations this study @xcite investigated the existence of post-editese features in a literary corpus composed of two different genres: alice's adventures in wonderland (aw) and the girl on the train (tgott), which were post-edited by nine professional translators. results show a clear difference between the literary genres: while literary texts whose author's style is full of figurative language pose a harder challenge to the mt system, texts that emphasise action over language style are less challenging. we validate this assumption based on our observations that aw involved more edits than the tgott test set, suggesting that the mt output is capable of expressing the meaning of the source text more efficiently than for the aw. moreover, we find a more visible pattern in terms of features for the tgott test set when compared to the aw which, in turn, is unstable in terms of pattern manifestation. this allowed us to confirm our post-editese hypothesis for almost all features in the tgott but for none in the aw. ## post-editese in backtranslations this ongoing study aims at researching whether the post-editese features remain on backtranslated texts. to this end, we backtranslated the previous pe versions of the tgott and aw texts using an mt system, and extracted the same features examined in the previous studies in order to address the following questions: a) are the post-editese features reported in @xcite preserved in the bt texts? b) how are post-editese features manifested in bt? are bt features closer to the pes or to the source texts? the results will shed a light on whether bt from post-edited versions show more features from human involvement, and if so, whether that means pe-bts have a higher quality. this will help the mt field, especially in regards to data augmentation. ## post-editese and translation quality finally, mt-pese will look into whether posteditese features can be correlated with translation quality and creativity. for that, a few main research questions have been designed: a) which post-editese features are correlated to high quality post-edited texts? b) are there any features that can be correlated with naturalness? c) are there any features that can be correlated with creativity? the results of this study will shed light on whether post-editese features mean that the pe version are of higher quality when compared to the raw mt output. if so, these features could be used to develop new evaluation metrics.