From Old Fashioned “One Size Fits All” to Tailor Made Online Training

Abstract

Nowadays, post-editing of machine translation output represents a significant element in the translation market and industry. Subsequently, the preparation of future translators must cover not only all routine methods but must be cost-effective, efficient and in accordance with human resources available. That is the reason we use Internet-based technologies more and more. New emerging technologies are very often driven by the marketing power of companies developing and selling applications. Each of us experienced dozens of fantastic features available in teaching software and applications. The core skill of the online educator is to find a balance between our needs and ability to use technology. Since translation demand keeps growing every day, a large number of translators use various technical tools including translation memories, terminology management tools or Machine Translation (MT) technologies and thus increase their productivity and meet this high demand. The post-editing of MT should be only done by a person who is familiar with this method and knows exactly what, how and how much needs to be edited in the text. Otherwise, the sense of post-editing is losing importance, as the work of post-editor would not be more effective as a translator’s, who translates the text traditional way “from scratch”. The contribution of the paper is to create an online educational system tailored to translators’ needs; an online system in which students translate and revise a text, post-edit machine translation output and also assess the quality of the translation.