Abstract
Language technologies such as machine translation plus post-editing by human translators
(MT+PE) are increasingly prevalent in the translation industry, and studies have investigated
MT+PE about its greater efficiency, time savings, and higher quality. However, the one of the major
issues that the translation industry (in Japan) faces is as to who will be the post-editors. Most
professional translators who are currently actively working are under pressure of cost reduction;
hence feel negative towards MT+PE, and even skeptical about the quality of MT raw output. This
is in line an empirical research by Yamada (2011c) showing that the professional translators did not
feel it advantageous to switch their production style to its MT post-editing mode.
This pilot study will investigate potentials of college language learners and novice translators to
become post-editors. The investigation focuses on changes and improvement in participants’
attitude/preference toward MT+PE. The study uses both questionnaires and experiments. The
tentative results will be presented in this paper.
