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AD 2024: MT or PE?

A client has asked about using machine translation for a large document. They don't even know if they want it post-edited :-) Here are a few tips, assuming that the language pair is between English and Dutch, German or Polish.

1) You and your client may find useful a how-to about preparing text for MT – whether the machine translation shall be published as-is, or you will post-edit it.

2) For your language pair, DeepL still seems to be the best choice.

3) To ensure proper protection of your client’s intellectual property, as well as to enable a few more advanced options, I recommend that you use a DeepL Pro account.

4) The feature with the best effort-to-performance ratio that I highly recommend, even if you need to produce MT and not post-edit it, is the Glossary function of DeepL – available both from browser and from CAT plug-in. The glossary allows to apply preferred terminology in the MT in a consistent way. You can also use the Glossary to exclude from translation the do-not-translate terms like company and person names.

  1. Skim the source document for key terminology
  2. Prepare a glossary with translation of these key terms as a comma-separated file
  3. Upload the file to DeepL
  4. The machine translation will pick up your preferred terminology.

5) After you prepare MT for the client (using the above hints), let the client decide – for example, by evaluating samples of machine translation – if they want to publish it as is, or if they decide to order full post-editing service from you. I once wrote down a few hints how to decide about post-editing: it’s less about the quality of MT and more about the role of published text!

6) If the client decides to publish a machine-translated text without full post-editing, it is a good practice to clearly mark it as such 🙂