Olga Torres	Celia Rico	Miguel-Ángel Candel Mora
will present the Poster… The Use of Machine Translation and Post-editing among Translation Service Providers in Spain Co-Authors: Ramon Piqué, Marisa Presas Corbella, Pilar Sánchez-Gijón, Adrià Martín Mor, Pilar Cid Leal, Anna Aguilar-Amat, and Amparo Alcina Caudet
Olga Torres-Hostench, PhD and BA in Translation, is a lecturer of specialised translation and multimedia localization at the Departament of Translation, Interpreting and East Asian Studies at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has contributed to several research projects on translation with Spanish funding (ProjecTA, LAW10n, TRACE) as well as European funding (LEviS, ClipFlair, EGPS) and she has published in several translation journals such as Meta, Perspectives and Babel. She is a member of the Tradumàtica research group and her current research interests focus on translation & technologies, MT post-editing and employability. She is an active member of standardization committees developing CEN and ISO standards on translation services.	Celia Rico, Ph.D. and MSc in Machine Translation is a senior lecturer at Universidad Europea (Madrid, Spain), where she trains future translators on the fundamentals of CAT tools as well as on the principles of translation strategies. With an extensive background in Translation Technologies research, Dr. Rico’s publications have concentrated on areas such as translation memory evaluation, machine translation, post-editing, and the impact of new technologies on the translation profession. Her major contributions to this field are to be found in different international publications such as Meta, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, Tradumàtica, Translation Spaces, Multilingual and Localisation Focus. She is member of the Expert Committee “Post-editing of Machine Translation Output” at ISO TC37.	Miguel Ángel Candel-Mora is an associate professor in the department of AppliedLinguistics of the Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain. He holds an MA inTranslation from Kent State University and a PhD in Linguistics from the Universitat deValència. For the last twenty years he has also worked as a translator actively involvedin the translation and localisation industry. His academic interests focus ontranslation-oriented bilingual terminology management, computational terminology,computer-assisted translation, information retrieval, corpus-based translation andtext mining.

This article presents the results of a market survey carried out on the use of machine translation (MT) and MT post-editing (PE) among translation service providers (TSPs) in Spain. This market survey is part of a research project called ProjecTA, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Ref. FFI2013-46041-R), which attempts to analyse the flow of MT+PE work in the professional translation sector in Spain and develop guidelines for professional translators to implement MT translation projects. The specific aim of this market survey is to systematically collect, analyse and disseminate information on the use of MT and PE in order to help TSPs make decisions on how to incorporate MT and PE into this business and also to help Spanish universities make decisions on incorporating MT and PE into their degree programmes. Our initial hypothesis was that MT was not implemented evenly across Spanish companies. Quantitative data were collected through an online survey, which was sent to 189 Spanish TSPs in January and February 2015. The results from the survey show that almost 50% of the Spanish companies that participated in the survey use machine translation and carry out post-editing, albeit on a limited basis.

Extended Abstract

In recent years, statistical machine translation has taken over business translation processes on a massive scale, seriously undermining the figure of the translator. Many translators are becoming machine translation post-editors, and the future of the profession is a hot topic on translators’ forums and within translators’ associations. This huge transformation represents a major challenge for translation companies. The ProjecTA research project addresses this social and economic challenge, rather than ignoring this paradigm shift and looking the other way, as many translators who are uncomfortable with machine translation have been doing for years.

ProjecTA has different aims: (1) to describe the use of machine translation and post-editing among translation service providers (TSPs) in Spain; (2) to describe each of the phases that take place when TSPs us machine translation and post-editing in the translation process; (3) to carry out various tests and develop and propose management guidelines and practical resources for future translators/post-editors and the industry in general.

The emergence of statistical machine translation as a common resource used in projects has created new tasks for translators, who may be in charge of any new knowledge information systems. Translators will have to master the following phases of any translation process using statistical machine translation: preparing the documentation, preparing machine translation resource, system training, text pre-editing, machine translation, post-editing and providing feedback for the system. Additionally, translators must have the right skills to manage these corpus-based systems and the appropriate language-pair engine for each translation assignment. In order to prepare translators for these challenges, we need to know the real scope and use of MT and PE among TSPs in Spain.

This poster will present in graphical form the results of a market survey carried out on the use of machine translation (MT) and MT post-editing (PE) among translation service providers (TSPs) in Spain. This market survey is part of a research project called ProjecTA, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Ref. FFI2013-46041-R) and aimed at analysing the flow of MT+PE work in the professional translation sector in Spain and developing guidelines for professional translators to take charge of implementing MT translation projects.

The specific aim of the market survey is to systematically collect, analyse and disseminate information on the use of MT and PE in order to help TSPs to make decisions on how to incorporate MT and PE into the business and also to help Spanish universities to make decisions on incorporating MT and PE into their degree programmes.

Our initial hypothesis was that MT was not implemented evenly among Spanish companies. In order to accept or reject our initial hypothesis we collected quantitative as well as qualitative data.

Quantitative data were collected through an online survey, which was reviewed by statistics experts and TSP representatives. The survey was sent to 189 Spanish TSPs in January and February 2015; 55 of the survey responses received (29.5% of the sample) were deemed valid. The survey contained 17 questions, distributed in three areas: (a) basic identification information from the TSP (location, number of employees, annual turnover, etc.); (b) services and specialties offered by the TSP, most common source and target languages, types of customers, etc.; (c) use of MT and PE in the company (use of MT; reasons not to use MT; percentage of MT use in the company’s projects; type of MT system; ownership of the MT system; translators’ acceptance of PE work; percentage of PE use in the company’s projects).

Qualitative data were obtained via telephone interviews, personal interviews with experts and a focus group session in the second quarter of 2015. The qualitative information will not be included in the poster, but in a further report. Despite focusing on the Spanish market, this survey may provide valuable information for researchers interested in carrying out similar market surveys on MT and PE in their own countries. Moreover, the results of the study provide new information on the use of MT and PE in Europe.

Thus, the aim of the poster is three-fold: (1) to disseminate the quantitative results of the market survey on the use of MT and PE among TSPs in Spain; (2) to facilitate networking with translation researchers interested in the use of MT and PE; (3) to invite translation companies to contribute to the research project.

[Camera-ready version of the accepted poster will include the results of the survey]