Who’s afraid of literary post-editing? Performances and Reflections of Student Translators

Despite the advances in the automation of translation processes, several discourses insist that there is still a privileged status for the non-automated human, especially in idealized conceptualisations of literary translation. Empirical data from experiments with 141 students show general awareness of trade-offs between the advantages and disadvantages of post-editing texts by Agatha Christie. Although machine translation was assumed to suffer from excessive literalism, it was also criticized for being deceptively fluent. Comparison of work by post-editors and from-scratch translators shows that the former tends to use risk transfer, trusting machine translation in situations of uncertainty, while the latter are more prone to risk taking. The two strategies lead to errors of different kinds, with the from-scratch translations having significantly fewer errors than the results of post-editing, with the exception of the “deviations” resulting from excessive risk taking.