Services
Post-editing
You’ve received documentation that you need to understand urgently, but which is not going to be published. You have some highly technical manuals with little commercial impact that, according to local legislation, need to be translated. You have a very tight budget but you need to translate some scarcely visible materials. If you find yourself in any of these situations, post-editing might be the solution for you.
Technology at our service
The way to optimize resources for tactical projects
Artificial intelligence, neural networks, and the current computing capacities have made what seemed like fantasy a reality: texts translated to another language in seconds. Although the initial result is incorrect, a human professional edits and corrects the text to create the finished product. If you have an already well-written text (this is very important) that doesn’t have any legal implications and not a lot of visibility, it may therefore be a good candidate for post-editing. Once the machine translation engine has translated the document, you have various options depending on your needs:
Documentation for private use
A human translator edits the text to make sure it carries the same meaning as the source text and is legible. This is a good option for documents that just need to be understood and are not going to be published, as it does not come with any type of guarantee.
Low-impact documents
A human translator native in the target language edits the machine translation to guarantee that the meaning matches the original and improves the style to enhance readability. This would be sufficient for low-impact documents.
User manuals and similar
A human translator edits the machine translation and ensures that the style is as similar as possible to that which would have been achieved with a human translation. Suitable for low-impact user manuals or not very visible website subpages.
Key points of the service
A speedy service, provided by native experts in each target language and 100% adapted to the needs of the client.
- Machine translation output is never usable as is
- It’s important to choose a company with experienced post-editors who can quickly identify the problems in each sentence
- Post-editing cannot be used for documents with legal implications or implications for people’s lives
- You need to carefully assess if it is appropriate to use post-editing for marketing documents
- You need clear advice from your translation partner regarding the best post-editing option, depending on the intended use of the translation
- It’s a good idea to choose a company that complies with ISO 18587 on the processing of machine translation output
FAQs
Any questions? Check out our FAQs or contact us for more information.
Post-editing is the process of improving a translation generated by a machine translation engine. Therefore, post-editing is the work that takes place after a machine translation engine has translated the text. The person tasked with performing post-editing is a post-editor, who is a reviser with special training for this kind of correction work. They not only correct meaning and grammar, but also style and tone. The end goal is for the post-editing to result in a translation with completely correct meaning and with as natural a style as possible.
Carrying out a machine translation and post-editing process may be the most appropriate solution in specific cases in which the priority is to have a large text translated (for internal use or general use, in the case of materials with reduced visibility) in the shortest possible amount of time. The main goal is to obtain a translation that matches the original in terms of meaning. If the material in the source language meets the necessary requirements, applying machine translation and post-editing may be a good solution, bearing in mind that it is a faster, more economical method than standard translation. We have the procedures and the necessary equipment to guarantee adequate results at a speed that was almost unthinkable just a few years ago. Treeloc also holds ISO 18587 certification, which certifies the procedures used to perform post-editing. Please do not hesitate to contact us: together we can assess if machine translation, plus post-editing, may be the answer to your documentation requirements.
ISO 18587 details the procedures that must be used to carry out the post-editing of a text translated automatically, and describes the competences and the experience the post-editor must have. Treeloc was one of the first companies in the world to obtain the ISO 18587 certification. This ISO standard formally ensures that all the relevant procedures have been followed to guarantee that the end result of the post-editing is satisfactory.
