“Cons and Cons of Post-Editing for Third Parties. Pros and Pros of Post-Editing for Our Own Business”

When describing MpT (machine pseudo-translation), software vendors and agencies interested in convincing translators that MpT is a good opportunity tend to focus on a lot of information that doesn’t help translators understand the whole story. On the contrary, we are flooded with charts, numbers, and weird words and acronyms while being tagged “luddites” if we don’t eagerly join the party. For our business it’s simply not all that important to understand those things. What we do indeed need to understand is that MpT can be analyzed from different perspectives and categorized accordingly. For instance: 1) online or offline (online, by the way, is illegal); 2) free or paid; 3) feeding our own corpus or feeding somebody else’s corpus.
This will not be a technological presentation. Rather, the speaker will analyze the underlying concepts behind MpT within the context of all resulting consequences. The speaker will also explain why not all MpT is good and not all MpT is bad. She will explain too why it is of key importance to understand that translators should be the ones profiting directly from new translation technologies.

Aurora Humarán graduated from the University of Buenos Aires with a BA in translation (sworn translator) in 1982. In 2005, she received her degree as a certified proofreader from Fundación Litterae-Fundéu. Throughout her 32 years in the profession, she has specialised in legal, financial, banking, and marketing translation. She is the director of Just is Spanish, a translation bureau made up of sworn translators, lawyers, and copyeditors. In 2011she was appointed a Corresponding Member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language. She is a founding member and the president of the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters.