Pre-editing

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Pre-editing is the process whereby a human prepares a document before applying machine translation. [1] The main goal of pre-editing is to reduce the post-editing workload by adapting the source document to improve the raw output of the machine translation. Pre-editing could be also valuable for human translation projects since it can increase the application of the translation memory.

In general, pre-editing is worth to apply when there are more than three target languages. In this case, pre-editing should facilitate the process of machine translation by spell and grammar checking, avoiding complex or ambiguous syntactic structure, and verifying term consistency. However, it is also applicable to poorly-converted files. [2] Linguistic pre-editing is more important than pre-editing of the format since errors can affect machine translation quality.

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References

  1. Pre-editing by forum users: a Case Study , Bouillon P., Gaspar L., Gerlach J., Porro V., Roturier J., in: Proceedings of the 9th Edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), CNL Workshop, Reykjavik, Islande, 2014.
  2. Combining pre-editing and post-editing to improve SMT of user-generated content, Gerlach J., Porro V., Bouillon P., Lehmann S., in: Proceedings of the Machine Translation Summit XIV, Nice, France, 2013.