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.
- If you do not need to post-edit the text, I recommend to translate from browser by uploading files. This gives DeepL a better chance to pick up context.
- If you need to post-edit the text, you can use the same DeepL Pro account to work with DeepL in your CAT tool via DeepL MT plug-in.
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.
- Skim the source document for key terminology
- Prepare a glossary with translation of these key terms as a comma-separated file
- Upload the file to DeepL
- 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 🙂