What is absolutely clear to me is that post edited translation will become mainstream and acceptable over the next few years.

However there needs to be a warning to users – if the suggested translations delivered to the translators edirting screen by MT are to be acceptable to translators, the MT engine must first be customized for the customer. “Gist” MT – no matter which MT engine is used – (i.e. without any customization or training) will simply not deliver the quality to translators. Customers will therefore not see the main benefits of post edited translation – cost savings and quicker delivery – if “gist” MT is used.

By the way, both Satish Maripuri and Mark Lancaster did not discuss the costs of customisation, although Mark Lancaster did imply that this difficult and expensive. Not so . For instance, Jeff Allen has been post editing individual documents in Systran for many years (he builds a qucik dictionary and then re-translates the document) and at Translution we can customize an MT engine to be used by the whole organisation at low cost. Training an MT engine so that it can by used by an SME for post editing is very affordable today and is not just something large companies can take advantage of.

In summary, I realise that both Lionbridge and IBM are big companies but I still cannot see what all the fuss is about – unless the announcement is an acknowledgement that post edited translation will now rapidly become a reality.