CG: n

CT: Post-editing was never meant to be the future of machine translation (MT). For researchers seeking fully automatic translation, post-editing is considered more of a failure mode. For human translators, it often forces the user to correct erroneous output. But translation memory (TM), which is essentially a deterministic MT system augmented with heuristics, is not the future either. So what should we expect? Is the current post-editing technology our best hope? To help answer these questions, let’s begin with a short history of post-editing before delving into more recent developments in machine-assisted translation technology.

1960s: First Experiences with post-editing

In the January 1965 issue of Physics Today, Robert Beyer, a professor of physics at Brown University, described his experience post-editing a scientific paper from Russian into English. He was participating in a National Science Foundation (NSF) program started in 1955 for the purpose of translating Soviet physics journals. Ten years later, the program was generating 15,000 pages annually at a cost of $500,000, which was covered through subscriptions. It was a popular and necessary program. For example, Beyer observed that Sputnik was not an instantaneous achievement, but it had been “foreshadowed in their [Russian] literature, but this was largely unknown in the West.” Beyer noted that a language barrier, as even the tourist knows, is an effective way of discussing secrets in plain view.

S: ATA (last access: 28 May 2025)

N: 1. – post- (prefix): word-forming element meaning “after,” from Latin post “behind, after, afterward,” from *pos-ti (source also of Arcadian pos, Doric poti “toward, to, near, close by;” Old Church Slavonic po “behind, after,” pozdu “late;” Lithuanian pas “at, by”), from PIE *apo- (source also of Greek apo “from,” Latin ab “away from” see apo-).

– editing (n): Present participle of the verb “edit” (1791), “to publish,” perhaps a back-formation from “editor”, or from French éditer (itself a back-formation from édition) or from Latin editus, past participle of edere “give out, put out, publish”. Meaning “to supervise for publication” is from 1793. Meaning “make revisions to a manuscript, etc.,” is from 1885. Related: Edited; editing. As a noun, by 1960, “an act of editing.”

• post-editing, n. The action of post-edit, v.
  The earliest known use of the noun post-editing is in the 1950s.
  OED’s earliest evidence for post-editing is from 1955, in the writing of L. E. Dostert.

• post-editor. n. The earliest known use of the noun post-editor is in the 1950s.
  OED’s earliest evidence for post-editor is from 1953, in a text by A. D. Booth and K. H. V. Booth.

• In the realm of translation, “post-editing” is a very important part of the translation cycle. This concept has been in existence since 1950’s when machine translation was not producing perfect output and had to be edited manually.

2. “Post-editing” is the term used to describe the activity of revising a text that has been translated automatically by a Machine Translation (MT) system.

3. Veale and Way (1997) state that the task of post-editors can be made easier if the machine translation software can lessen the number of errors while translating the source text into target text. A comprehensive definition for post-editing has been given in the Draft of European Standards for Translation Services (2004) as “examination and correction of the text resulting from an automatic or semi-automatic machine system (machine translation, translation memory) to ensure that it complies with the natural laws of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and meaning, etc”. Pym (2011b) defines post-editing as the “term for the  process of making corrections or amendments to automatically generated text, notably machine-translation output.” In this paper Pym mentions that post-editing is the opposite of pre-editing.

4. Types of post-editing.

• Laurean (1984) declares that there are two types of post-editing, namely conventional post-editing and rapid post-editing. In the first type the contents of the target text must be as similar to the source as possible, whilst in the latter type the style is not as important as the language in the target text. Temizöz (2013) defines rapid post-editing as “light post-editing or minimal post-editing”. The main condition in this category is that content of the target text should be comprehensible for the reader. According to Temizöz (2013) this category is used in translating e-mails, documents that have a short life or translation of messages that are to be read by very close groups of people.

S: 1. Etymonline – https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=post-editing&page=2, https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=editing (last access: 28 May 2025); OED – https://www.oed.com/dictionary/post-editing_n?tab=factsheet#10304740, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/post-edit_v?tab=factsheet#10304518, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/post-editor_n (last access: 28 May 2025); RG (last access: 28 May 2025); MO (30 May 2025). 2. HTS (last access: 28 May 2025). 3 & 4. RG (last access: 28 May 2025); MO (30 May 2025).

OV: postediting (USA, Canada)

S: TERMIUM PLUS (last access: 28 May 2025); GDT (last access: 28 May 2025); MW (last access: 28 May 2025).

SYN: machine translation postediting, MT postediting.

S: TERMIUM PLUS (last access: 28 May 2025)

CR: artificial intelligence, computational intelligence, computer-assisted translation, computer science, language engineering, machine translation, translation.