Post-Editese in Literary Translations

Abstract

In the present study, we investigated the post-editese phenomenon, i.e., the unique features that set machine translated post-edited texts apart from human-translated texts. We used two literary texts, namely, the English children’s novel by Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (AW) and Paula Hawkins’ popular book The Girl on the Train (TGOTT). Both literary texts were Google translated from English into Brazilian Portuguese to investigate whether the post-editese features can be found on the surface of the post-edited (PE) texts. In addition, we examined how the features found in the PE texts differ from the features encountered in the human-translated (HT) and machine translation (MT) versions of the same source text. Results revealed evidence for post-editese for TGOTT only with PE versions being more similar to the MT output than to the HT texts.