What is MTPE?: An Introductory Guide For Businesses

Have you ever needed a large number of documents translated quickly? Let’s say you do, and you call up a translation services company to do the job.

You brace yourself to hear how much it would cost, but you find yourself pleasantly surprised not only at the price in the quote but also at the projected turnaround time. But how is this possible?

This situation is possible if what you’re being offered is machine translation post-editing or MTPE.

What is Machine Translation Post-Editing?

Some also call it post-edited or post-editing machine translation (PEMT), but machine translation post-editing and MTPE are the more commonly accepted terms. MTPE is a kind of translation process in which a document is first processed through a machine translation (MT) engine, and the output is proofread by a human editor.

One might consider MTPE a hybrid, or even a cyborg solution to the problem of high demand in the translation industry. MTPE blends both human skill and machine efficiency to provide a solution that is quick and cost-effective while maintaining a certain standard for the quality of the result.

Types of MTPE

People who are unfamiliar with the field might not know what to expect from MTPE. They might either think that the results of MTPE are inferior to human translation, or they might think that there’s no difference between the two.

Neither side is necessarily wrong. Different kinds of post-editing have different results. Language service providers generally agree that there are two types of post-editing services:

• Light post-editing

• Full post-editing

The primary goal of light post-editing is to make a text understandable. This involves proofreading to fix grammatical errors and clarifying confusing or inaccurate phrases. The quality of this process is usually lower than that of a human translator, but MTPE makes up for this through more affordable costs and quicker delivery. It’s an ideal solution for texts used for internal purposes, or are only necessary for a short time.

Full post-editing is a more thorough approach to the MTPE process, involving not only proofreading and clarification but also revisions to ensure that the text reads as naturally as a human-translated text. The post-editor works on maintaining a cohesive tone and style, as well as complete accuracy of terms and phrases, during the editing process. In many cases, it also involves taking into account the cultural and linguistic nuances that tend to be lost in machine translation.

Read more: The Art of Translation: A Deep Dive into Light vs. Full Post-Editing

The Benefits of MTPE

Now that we've covered the types of post-editing translation, let's explore the benefits of a hybrid approach for translating large volumes of content. Here are the key advantages:

1. Cost-Effectiveness

By using MT technology for the initial machine translation post-editing process, the time and effort needed from human translators are greatly reduced. This reduction in labor translates to lower costs for clients, making professional language service providers more accessible and affordable.

2. Speed and Efficiency

Post-machine translation editing greatly speeds up translation projects. Machines can quickly handle large volumes of text, providing an initial translation that human editors refine. This ensures faster turnaround times without compromising quality, which is especially helpful for clients with tight deadlines.

3. Consistency and Uniformity

Machine translation systems excel at maintaining consistency, especially with repetitive and technical content. Post-edited machine translation ensures that terminology, style, and formatting are uniform throughout the document. Human editors can fine-tune the output while following specific guidelines and glossaries.

4. Scalability

Post-editing machine translation allows translation services to scale more efficiently. Machines handle the initial translation, making it easier to manage larger or multiple projects simultaneously. This scalability is crucial for businesses expanding into global markets without being hindered by language barriers.

5. Enhanced Quality Control

Combining machine translation with human post-editing ensures high quality. MT provides a solid foundation, and human editors refine the translation, correct errors, and ensure cultural relevance. This dual approach reduces the risk of mistranslation and enhances the final product's overall quality.

Read more: Machine Translation Evaluation: The Ultimate Guide

6. Flexibility and Adaptability

Machine translation post-editing offers a flexible solution for different types of content and industries. Whether it's technical manuals, marketing materials, or legal documents, post-editing translation can be customized to meet specific needs. Human editors can adjust the translation's tone, style, and context, ensuring it resonates with the target audience.

7. Improved Translator Productivity

For professional translators, post-edited machine translation boosts productivity and job satisfaction. By automating the initial phase, often repetitive tasks, translators can focus on more complex and creative aspects of translation. This improves their efficiency, allows them to deliver higher quality work, and enables them to take on more projects.

MTPE vs. Raw MT and Human Translation: Key Differences

Since we've mentioned human translations and raw machine translations, let's explore how these differ from post-machine translation editing. Here’s a simple look at their key differences:

1. Quality and Accuracy

As mentioned, post-editing translations offer a balance of speed and quality. Machines handle the initial translation, and humans refine it to ensure accuracy and nuance. In contrast, raw machine translation is fast but often inaccurate, as it lacks human oversight, leading to errors and missing cultural context.

Meanwhile, Human translation is considered the most accurate and culturally relevant option. Human translators ensure precision and proper context, making it ideal for high-quality needs.

2. Speed and Efficiency

Compared to human translation, post-edited machine translation is faster because machines do most of the work, with humans refining it. The slowest translation process is human translation due to the detailed work of translators, ensuring the highest quality. The fastest translation process option is raw machine translation. However, despite providing quick and immediate translations, it often sacrifices quality. 

3. Cost

Post-edited machine translation is more affordable than human translation because MT technology reduces the workload for human editors. Raw machine translation is the cheapest option as it eliminates human labor, making it suitable for general content. Human translation is the most expensive due to the expertise required, so it is best for specialized, high-stakes content.

4. Context and Cultural Nuance

Raw machine translation often misses cultural nuances and context, resulting in awkward or incorrect translations. This is why many prefer human translation, as it best captures context and cultural nuances, ensuring the translation is appropriate for the target audience.

However, if you need quick translations without compromising context and cultural accuracy, post-editing translation is the best option. It combines the speed of machine translation with human oversight to correct errors.

5. Flexibility and Customization

Post-editing machine translation offers flexibility, as human editors can tailor the translation to specific needs, making it suitable for various industries. In contrast, raw machine translation lacks flexibility and customization, resulting in generic translations. Human translation is highly customizable, allowing translators to meet specific client requirements and preferences.

Not all translation projects work for MTPE yet

Here’s an important caveat: many documents still need a fully human touch to do properly, often in industries where high creativity or absolute precision is required.

Translating for the legal sector, for example, or for healthcare—these demand no room for errors, and the full scrutiny of a professional translator with a background in those fields. On the other far end is marketing, where the creative element of human language still eludes machine translation.

Still, with continuing advances in MT technology, MTPE, in the form of full post-editing, is starting to become a feasible option in more and more fields.

Why is post-editing machine translation output feasible?

Machine translation has a history dating back to the invention of the computer, but MTPE is a fairly recent development. In fact, it’s been less than a decade since post-editing machine translation was considered a serious option for industrial use!

Much research has gone into the development of machine translation, but for over six decades progress remained below the level where it could actually be useful. But thanks to developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, MT technology was able to develop to a more sophisticated degree than ever before.

The MT engines of today are capable of providing output whose quality is good enough for human translators to review and make edits more quickly than in the past.

Who Can Benefit from MTPE and Best Practices for Getting Started

Post-editing machine translation isn’t only for translation services companies. Businesses that work with a lot of multilingual data can invest in MTPE too. Small and medium businesses are especially suited for MTPE because it is cost-effective and ensures quality.

MTPE helps these businesses quickly and accurately translate large volumes of content, allowing them to reach global markets. It also ensures consistent branding and messaging in different languages. Perfect for businesses planning to grow internationally.

It isn’t an easy process, however. There is a lot of work to be done in getting the appropriate post-edited machine translation solution for any specific business. But here are some of the basics:

Choosing the right MT engine

The first step to investing in MTPE is choosing the right MT engine. There are many different ones out there, and it can be overwhelming to decide which one is the right solution, so here are some points to keep in mind.

The first should be to narrow down the options to MT engines adapted for your specific industry. MT engines that are preset with industry-specific data will provide better results than translation engines trained on linguistic data that is generic.

Another consideration with regard to narrowing down your options is how well the MT engine does in specific language pairs. Be sure to choose an MT engine that performs well in the ones that you need.

Finally—and this is the most important thing—the MT engine that you choose should ideally be one that you can customize with your own data. Even if it’s already adapted to your industry, there may be certain terms or phrasing that are unique to you, or which you’d prefer to leave untranslated. Being able to feed new training data to your MT engine will go a long way toward making it a better fit for your specific needs.

Develop Clear Guidelines

Create detailed guidelines for post-editors to follow. These guidelines should include instructions on style, terminology, and quality standards to ensure consistency throughout the translation process.

Clearly defined guidelines help post-editors understand the specific requirements of each project, maintain uniformity in translations, and meet client expectations. By providing comprehensive instructions, you can ensure that all translations align with the desired tone, terminology preferences, and overall quality standards, resulting in more accurate and reliable translations.

Training/customizing your MT engine

Once you’ve chosen your MT engine, the next step is to customize it. But you might think that today’s MT engines are trained upon billions and billions of translated text segments; would your data even make a dent in that kind of training?

The answer is yes. MT engines don’t rely on quantity alone. The quality of data is also important. Today’s MT engines use AI and deep neural networks to make sophisticated connections that depend on high-quality data, which provides the necessary context for the MT engine to make the right translation. Sources of high-quality data include glossaries, translation memories, and text segments that have already been translated properly.

Results may differ among MT engine providers, and some may require more data than others to come up with a well-trained custom MT engine. But with high-quality data, it’s possible to see good results.

Hiring a machine translation post-editor

Once you’re done with your MT engine, it’s time to turn toward finding the right language professional to work with it.

While post-editing work is mostly proofreading and revising MTPE output in one language, it’s not a good idea to give the work to someone who’s monolingual, or unfamiliar with the source language. Machine translation still isn’t perfect, so there may still be errors that only a human translator is able to catch.

You’ll also want your post-editor to have a background in your particular sector. For example, if you’re in law, what you need is a language professional with a legal background. For the healthcare industry, someone also working in medicine would be appropriate. And so on.

Apart from their knowledge of languages in general, knowledge of your industry’s linguistic terms and their contexts will help your post-editor work more effectively.

Provide Adequate Training

Ensure post-editors receive proper training on using the MT system and adhering to your guidelines. Comprehensive training should cover how to effectively utilize the MT software, understand the nuances of post-editing, and apply the established guidelines consistently.

Regular training updates are crucial to keep post-editors informed about new features, best practices, and evolving industry standards. This ongoing education helps maintain high quality in translations and ensures that post-editors are equipped to handle any challenges that arise.

Pre-editing your source text

Here’s a pro tip: machine translation works best with simple texts.

It’s always a good idea to look over your source text first to ensure that everything’s grammatically correct and that there are no errors. If you can, take the additional time to change ambiguous phrases, and break down complex sentences into simpler components. Your post-editor will thank you when they receive the better machine-translated output.

Implement a Quality Assurance Process

Set up a robust quality assurance (QA) process to maintain the highest standards in your translations. Regularly review post-edited translations to identify and rectify any errors or inconsistencies. This review process should include checks for accuracy, cultural relevance, and adherence to style and terminology guidelines.

Additionally, incorporate feedback loops where post-editors can learn from identified issues, leading to continuous improvement. By consistently monitoring and enhancing the quality of translations, you ensure that the final product meets client expectations and industry standards.

Read more: Effective Strategies for Minimizing Machine Translation Errors

Collect Feedback and Improve

Encourage feedback from both post-editors and clients to continually enhance your post-editing translation process. Establish clear channels for receiving and analyzing feedback on various aspects of the translation, such as accuracy, fluency, and cultural appropriateness. Use this valuable information to identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments.

Regularly updating your process based on feedback helps address any recurring issues, implement best practices, and adapt to evolving client needs. By fostering an environment of continuous improvement, you can ensure the overall quality and effectiveness of your MTPE services.

Monitor and Measure Performance

Track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as turnaround time, cost savings, and quality scores to effectively monitor and measure the performance of your post-editing machine translation implementation. Regularly analyze these metrics to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of your processes.

Use the data to identify strengths and areas for improvement, ensuring that your MTPE operations are meeting both client expectations and industry standards. By systematically evaluating these KPIs, you can make informed decisions to optimize workflows, enhance quality, and maximize the overall value of your MTPE services.

Foster Collaboration

Promote collaboration between translators, post-editors, and project managers to enhance the efficiency and quality of your MTPE process. Encourage open and effective communication to ensure that everyone involved understands project requirements, guidelines, and goals.

Regular meetings and collaborative platforms can facilitate knowledge sharing and address any issues promptly. By fostering a collaborative environment, you can ensure smoother workflows, minimize misunderstandings, and achieve better outcomes. This teamwork approach leads to higher-quality translations, greater consistency, and a more cohesive and productive working environment for all parties involved.

Read more: Mastering Translation Efficiency: A Guide to the Top CAT Tools in 2023

Stay Updated with Technology

Keep up with advancements in machine translation (MT) technology and update your systems regularly to maintain a competitive edge. Stay informed about new features, improvements, and innovations that can enhance the efficiency and accuracy of your post-editing process.

Implementing the latest technology can streamline workflows, reduce errors, and improve the overall quality of translations. Regularly training your team on these new tools and features ensures they are fully equipped to leverage the benefits. By staying technologically current, you can continuously optimize your MTPE operations and deliver superior results.

Conclusion

Machine translation has come a long way to make MTPE a feasible option for businesses. Businesses that want to work with language more efficiently now have many options and the means to get started on their post-editing translation journey.

Planning to implement post-editing machine translation in your business but not sure how to get started? Try our AI-assisted MT engine aggregator. Visit MachineTranslation.com and input your text into our tool. It will evaluate, compare, and analyze the best and most accurate MT engine output for your content. Our platform also has a post-editing feature that identifies which segments need a human translator. Sign up for a free subscription and get 1,500 free credits per month.

FAQs and Common Misconceptions

1. Is MTPE cheaper than human translation?

Yes, MTPE is generally more cost-effective because machines do most of the work, reducing the time and effort needed by human editors.

2. Can MTPE handle all types of content?

MTPE works well for many types of content but might not be ideal for highly creative or sensitive materials. Human translation is better for those cases.

3. Do human translators still have a role?

Absolutely. Human translators are crucial for ensuring high quality, especially for complex or culturally sensitive content. They bring expertise that machines can’t match.

4. Can MTPE be customized?

Yes, human editors can tailor MTPE translations to meet specific needs, ensuring the final product aligns with your preferences and requirements.

5. Can MTPE handle multiple languages simultaneously?

Yes, MTPE can efficiently handle multiple languages, making it a versatile solution for global businesses with diverse language needs.

6. Is MTPE limited to certain industries?

No, MTPE is versatile and can be used across various industries, including technical, medical, legal, and marketing fields. Human editors ensure that industry-specific terminology is accurately translated.

7. Is MTPE easy to integrate into existing workflows?

Yes, MTPE can be integrated into existing translation workflows, making it a seamless addition to a company's language services.