Hiring post-edit translators

Post-editing is the process whereby a human translator revises a machine-generated translation to deliver a final product. With the advancement of AI technology, machine translation can easily achieve 70-80% accuracy; meaning a human translator would only need to edit the remaining 20-30% to deliver a final product.

In recent years, corporations have caught on to the use of machine translation, and post-editing has become a mainstream choice for corporations wanting to publish their content in different languages. We have increasingly seen corporations and language service agencies requiring professional translators to revise machine-translated texts, instead of translating them from scratch. The upshot is a 60-70% efficiency in terms of turnaround time.

With technology improvements and continuing commercial demand for post-editing, this is an important area that will continue to grow.

However, the hiring of a post-edit translator may not be a straightforward exercise, and will depend on a few considerations:

1. Extent of Post-Editing Tasks

In a light post-editing process, the post-edit translator makes only minimal changes to increase the comprehension of the text. No stylistic changes or fluency improvements are required. This type of post-editing is generally limited to content used for internal communication within a company. Full post-editing is a more extensive process where the post-edit translator makes all the necessary changes to the machine translation output as well as improves its style and fluency. The larger the extent of post-editing, the more skilled the post-edit translator has to be.

2. Document Technicality and Specificity

The more technical and industry-specific the document is, the more important it is for the post-edit translator to have translation experience in that industry. A good example will be financial translation, where it typically requires 5-7 years of working experience for a translator to be well-versed in financial terms and syntax.

3. Post-editing Certification

Some companies have developed post-editing certification courses for translators, introducing translators to the techniques and skills involved in post-editing machine-translated output. These courses provide a theoretical overview of machine translation and post-editing, together with best-practice recommendations and practical examples. Some corporations would only hire translators with such certification for their post-editing jobs.