EDITING

Reporters: Rhynne Asira Vista and Jasmin Pariolo

What is Editing?
Arranging, revising, and preparing a written, audio, or video material for
final production, usually by a party (called an editor) other than the creator of
the material.
The editing process can involve correction, condensation, organization, and
many other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct,
consistent, accurate and complete work.
The editing process often begins with the author's idea for the work itself,
continuing as a collaboration between the author and the editor as the work is
created. As such, editing can involve creative skills, human relations and a
precise set of methods.

Objectives Of Editing Include:

(1) Detection and removal of factual, grammatical, and typographical error,
(2) Clarification of obscure passages
(3) Elimination of parts not suitable for the targeted audience, and
(4) Proper sequencing to achieve a smooth, unbroken flow of narrative.

Guidelines for Editing Translations

1. Be very careful about making universal changes
2. Talk to yourself
3. Write a memo
4. Never guess
5. Do not make the translation sounds as though it is your own, unless you
have been specifically asked to do so
6. Sit down and read the document through in the target language
7. Review the entire document before you start making changes on paper
(or in Track Changes)
8. Do not add errors to the text
9. If it looks wrong, assume that there may be an
10. error and research the issue
11. Sometimes, it just cannot be done

What is Post-Editing?
The correction of texts that have been translated from a source language into a target
language by a machine translation system (Allen, 2001)
Which can mean, tidying up the raw output, correcting mistakes, revising entire or, in
the worst case, retranslating entire sections (Somers, 2001, p138)

The aim of PE is to improve the output, not necessarily to make it perfect

post-edited output must become (more) usable or understandable;
least possible effort must be applied quickly:
the priority is to save time (not to lose the speed gains due to MT) and money;
the extent and accuracy of PE are negotiated/ specified on a case by case basis,
depending on users needs and requirements;

Factors Affecting PE Effectiveness

One has to balance and optimize quality/ speed/ cost in relation to the intended use of the
final translation:
Length of use of the translation;
Type, length and visibility of the document;
Turnaround time;
Needs and expectations of the user(s);
Ability of the readers to make use of the less
Ability of the readers to make use of less-than-perfect text;
PE guidelines vary hugely. In terms of e.g.:
When to use PE (vs. manual translation from scratch;
How to do PE, its global approach and specific correctness

Priorities in PE Different from those Applying to (revision) of HT

Factors to be considered (priorities):
PE is there to save time and money (optimal quality non-essential);
Understandability and correctness of general meaning are key.
Factors to be ignored (factors irrelevant in PE scenarios):
Details or nuances (of information, meaning, style, register, etc.);
Elegance, fluency, naturalness of expression.
The MT quality for a language combination of determines the need for, and
type/level of, PE.
PE can be an aspect of diagnostic MT evaluation, i.e. giving feedback to MT
developers to rectify frequent/ important errors.
Post-Editing Strategies
Like translation, PE can have various levels of quality requirements, e.g. gisting, high-
quality dissemination.
A unique requirement to PE is to ascertain if it would be best to PE the Text or translate it
from scratch manually;
These estimations may be quick judgements or more formal measures:
For example, a scale where evaluators are asked to estimate the effort required (Specia et al.
2009):
1. Requires complete translation
2. Post-editing quicker than retranslation
3. Little post-editing needed
4. Fit for purpose
PE may be carried out by translators, editors, bilinguals, and even monolinguals (e.g. crowd
sourcing).
PE guides, while still not commonplace, vary greatly given the company, language pairs,
and MT systems;

PE concerns three texts:

The original source text;
The raw MT output;
The post-edited MT output, i.e. the target.

Common PE operations include:

Fixing punctuation and capitalisation;
Changing sentence and phrase structures;
Editing grammatical agreements, e.g. singular/plural, masculine/feminine;
Retranslating whole words or expressions.

Two main approaches:

Fast PE and conventional PE (Loffler-Laurian 1996)
Fast PE:
Fast turnaround;
Limited resources;
Only essential corrections made to enable understanding.
Conventional PE:
Produce the 'gold standard' human translation;
More resources required.
The deciding factor is the decision of what the text is intended to be used for:
For example: Gisting -> fast PE; Publication - conventional PE.

There are also cases where no PE is required (Allen 2003), especially when working on
sentence level.