Suzana Cunha


2023

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MT and legal translation: applications in training
Suzana Cunha
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIX, Vol. 2: Users Track

This paper investigates the introduction of machine translation (MT) in the legal translation class by means of a pilot study conducted with two groups of students. Both groups took courses in legal translation, but only one was familiarised with post-editing (PE). The groups post-edited an extract of a Portuguese company formation document, translated by an open-access neural machine translation (NMT) system and, subsequently, reflected on the assigned task. Although the scope of the study was limited, it was sufficient to confirm that prior ex-posure to machine translation post-editing (MTPE) did not significantly alter both groups’ editing operations. The pilot study is part of a broader investigation into how technology affects the decision-making process of trainee legal translators, and its results contributed to fine-tuning a meth-odological tool that aims to integrate MTPE procedures in an existing process-oriented legal translation approach developed by Prieto Ramos (2014). The study was repeated this year. This time both groups of trainees were introduced to and used the tool in class. A comparison of both studies’ results is expected to provide insight onto the productive use of MTPE in other domain-specific texts.
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