Using Machine Translation and Post-Editing in the TRAPD Approach: Effects on the Quality of Translated Survey Texts

A highly controlled experimental setting using a sample of questions from the European Social Survey (ESS) and European Values Study (EVS) was used to test the effects of integrating machine translation and post-editing into the Translation, Review, Adjudication, Pretesting, and Documentation (TRAPD) approach in survey translation. Four experiments were conducted in total, two concerning the language pair English-German and two in the language pair English-Russian. The overall results of this study are positive for integrating machine translation and post-editing into the TRAPD process, when translating survey questionnaires. The experiments show evidence that in German and Russian languages and for a sample of ESS and EVS survey questions, the effect of integrating machine translation and post-editing on the quality of the review outputs-with quality understood as texts output with the fewest errors possible-can hardly be distinguished from the quality that derives from the setting with human translations only.