A descriptive study on the effects of post-editing on lexical diversity

Machine Translation (MT) technologies paved the way for great advances in the translation industry with the development of Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Translation companies and translators have started to save a great deal of time and energy by doing machine translation post-editing (MTPE) instead of translating from scratch -human translation- (HT). In this study, the volunteer participants were asked to both translate the same texts from scratch and post-edit by using a generic machine translation. The results were analysed comparatively with a focus on lexical diversity. According to the findings of the study, it has been observed that machine translation post-editing and human translation results differ significantly. When compared to the human translation results, machine translation post-editing results have been proved to be less rich in terms of lexical diversity.