Given the rise of neural machine translation (NMT) models, MT is increasingly used to produce raw translations to be further post-edited by translators (Lommel and DePalma, 2016). Post-editing (PE) is influenced by the MT system used and the number and the type of errors included therein (Koponen, 2012). In fact, the improved quality of the NMT system output requires the correction of fewer segments, but this does not always result in lower PE effort. Besides the effect that PE of different MT outputs may have on translators, a question arises about the effect that it may have on the intrinsic quality of a text or the extrinsic quality of the text. The aim of this study is twofold: it seeks to compare the temporal, technical and cognitive effort required for full PE of NMT output with the effort required for full PE of SMT output in the English-Greek language pair and also compare the extrinsic quality of final texts, i.e. its acceptability by end-users in terms of readability and comprehensibility. The findings indicate that the full PE of SMT output is more effortful, although it does not lead to translations of inferior quality in the context of the final end-user.

Maria Stasimioti is a PhD candidate at the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting at the Ionian University. She holds a BA in Translation Studies and an MA in Theory and Didactics of Translation from the same university. She has been working as a freelance translator and proofreader since 2010. She has taught Computer-Assisted-Translation and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) at the Ionian University and participated in the EU-funded project TraMOOC (Translation of Massive Open Online Courses, https://tramooc.eu/ ). Her research interests lie in the areas of Machine Translation (MT), Computer-Assisted-Translation (CAT), Post Editing (PE) and Cognitive Studies.

Dr Vilelmini Sosoni is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting at the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece, where she teaches Legal and Economic Translation, EU texts Translation and Terminology, Translation Technology, Translation Project Management and Audiovisual Translation (AVT). In the past, she taught Specialised Translation in the UK at the University of Surrey, the University of Westminster and Roehampton University, and in Greece at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Institut Français d’ Athènes.  She also has extensive industrial experience having worked as translator, editor, subtitler and interpreter as well as communications expert for the Hellenic Parliament. She holds a BA in English Language and Linguistics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, an MA in Translation and a PhD in Translation and Text Linguistics from the University of Surrey. Her research interests lie in the areas of Translation of Institutional Texts, Machine Translation (MT), Corpus Linguistics, Cognitive Studies, and AVT. She is a founding member of the Research Lab “Language and Politics” of the Ionian University and a member of its “Bioinformatics and Human Electrophysiology Lab”. She is also a member of the Advisory Board and the Management Board of the European Master’s in Technology for Translation and Interpreting (EM TTI). As of November 2020, she is also the Events Manager of the Greek Chapter of Women in Localization. She has participated in several EU-funded projects, notably RESONANT, TraMOOC, Eurolect Observatory and Training Action for Legal Practitioners: Linguistic Skills and Translation in EU Competition Law, while she has edited several volumes and books on translation and published numerous articles in international journals and collective volumes.