From July to August, we have been doing some post editing projects. These post-editing projects aim to provide translated instructions for software/application engineers/developers.

That is, the client does not expect post-edited texts to be perfect; rather what they expect for post-editors are (1) fast turnaround and (2) to provide post-translated texts that are of understandable quality for engineers and developers.

The client wants to maximize speed, while reaching quality that is good enough for its purposes. Here are a few things you should know to reach the desired level of quality without editing too much or slowing down the process.

1. Generally, the translation does NOT need to be perfect. A developer (the target audience) should be able to understand the translation without being distracted by terribly obvious errors.

2. DO correct errors in the following categories:

• Terminology/TM compliance
• Spelling
• Punctuation
• Major Meaning Errors
• Major Grammar Errors
• Omissions

3. Do NOT spend too much time worrying about the following:

• Formatting
• Capitalization
• Minor Meaning Errors
• Minor Grammar Errors
• Additions
• Flow and Style
• Style or preferential changes

Although the client hasn’t required the quality to be perfect, we still hope to do it in very good quality within the deadline. If it is possible, we arrange one translator and one editor to do on it. As we may know, some parts of the machine translations are bad, thus we can check out more errors.

If the deadline is not allowed to do like this, we arrange the senior editor who is very skilled in the corresponding field to work on it.

Also, these projects need to be done directly in the client’s online workbench. Due to the network speed, it is more difficult than working in the doc or excel files.

The editor should also be very patient with high sense of responsibility, and the editor will work overtime to meet the deadline if needed. So, we still spend much time and do much on it with the hope to make sure the very good quality.

Basically, post editing is the process of improving a machine-generated translation with a minimum of manual labour. It is distinct from editing which refers to the process of improving human generated text.

Post edited text may afterwards be revised to ensure the quality of the language choices or proofread to correct simple mistakes.

I think we will do it more efficiently for post editing projects with the experience on these days.