National Productivity Investment Fund (NPIF) Studentship

Supervisor: Professor Lucile Desblache

Institution email: artegiai@roehampton.ac.uk

The developments in Machine Translation in the last decade have been applauded by the general public who welcomed the opportunity for quick and free interlingual communication even if imperfect.

Professional translators have been more reluctant to accept this rise of automatic translation for a range of reasons: mistrust or dislike of technology, time needed for the technology learning curve and fear of job erosion as a consequence of technology implementation. However, all the evidence suggests that ‘machine translation post-editing is having a wide impact on the global workflow of translated content’ (Alonso and Nunes Vieira 2017). Traditionally, the area of media translation has been relatively preserved from the input of Machine Translation, but this is no longer the case.

Translators’ attitudes evolve slower than technology and this is perhaps even more striking with media translators who do not translate as repetitive texts as technical translators, more used to machine collaboration. The aims of my research are manifold, and include examining how post-editing is being re-defined in the current interlingual subtitling landscape; considering current professional attitudes to these new technological developments; and outlining the best profile for post-editors working in the creative industries.

The story of a battle between human and machine in professional situations, with the latter outperforming the former, is common in all professional fields. Yet what is currently happening is an acceleration of expectations in the capacity to evolve.