Defining language dependent post-editing rules. The case of the language pair English-Spanish

Abstract

This chapter reports part of the work carried out in the context of EDI-TA (Rico and Díez Orzas 2013a, 2013b), a research project focusing on the study of the different aspects of machine translation (MT) post-editing (PE) as an essential element in the translation workflow. More specifically, it focuses on the methodology used in the project for defining language dependent post-editing guidelines for the English-Spanish (EN-ES) pair. After a detailed introduction to the project’s objectives and main outcomes, the chapter goes on to describe the formal framework employed for designing PE guidelines. This is followed by a comprehensive account of how language dependent guidelines are defined and implemented, resulting in a whole set for the EN-ES combination, illustrated with actual examples. The chapter closes with a discussion of the value of this contribution to the field of MT post-editing as, so far, the specific definition of PE guidelines for the language pair concerned has been overlooked in the relevant literature, with a few exceptions (Guzmán 2007, 2008; Guerberof 2012).