In today's fast-paced business world, speed is just as important as quality. MTPE combines both: initial machine translation very quickly transfers texts into your target language, while experienced editors fine-tune them in post-editing. This blog post provides you with in-depth insights into MTPE, highlights its history, outlines its advantages and disadvantages, describes areas of application and explores its future prospects.
What does MTPE mean?
MTPE stands for Machine Translation Post-Editing, often referred to as machine translation and post-editing. In short, MTPE comprises two steps:
- Machine translation: An AI-based system generates a raw translation. Modern neural networks (NMT) already deliver astonishingly fluent text.
- Post-editing: Expert post-editors edit this raw text for accuracy and technical correctness. They pay attention not only to the correct terminology, but also to the style, tone and readability of the text.
Machine translation often achieves high throughput rates, but linguistic nuances and technical terms are often less precise and need human refinement. In contrast, human translation is unbeatable in terms of quality, but it is time-consuming and costly. MTPE combines the best of both worlds and is therefore suitable for both internal and external documents.
History
Machine translation and its providers started life in the 1950s with rule-based approaches, and has evolved continuously ever since. Statistical models (SMT) dominated the 1990s and were capable of learning but often failed when it came to more complex sentences. It was not until the advent of neural machine translation engines (NMT) in the mid-2010s that the raw quality became so good that machine translation systems and post-editing became economically viable.
In the early stages, translation memories (TM) and glossaries were essential to ensure consistency. Today, thanks to deep learning, an NMT engine can recognise semantic relationships and generate accurate translations. Nevertheless, post-editing remains indispensable: it more closely matches classic human translation by taking into account subtleties such as cultural idioms, brand-specific language and industry-specific terminology.
Advantages and disadvantages of MTPE
Advantages
- Cost savings: The reduction in the time it takes often results in overall costs being cut by 30–50%.
- Time savings: The duration of your project can be significantly reduced, as the majority of the text volume is generated automatically.
- Scalability: Even very large documents can be processed quickly by a team of post-editors.
- Consistency: TM systems and terminology databases ensure that technical terms remain consistent across all editions.
- Flexibility: MTPE is equally suitable for technical manuals, marketing content, and legal texts.
Disadvantages
- Quality fluctuations: Depending on the language combination and subject area, the quality of the raw machine-translated texts varies greatly.
- Set-up effort: Setting up an optimal MT engine, including glossary integration and quality profiles, requires initial resources.
- Dependence on technology: If the MT engine fails or there are technical problems, the entire workflow comes to a standstill.
- Expert costs: Qualified post-editors are often more expensive than simple proofreaders, as they combine in-depth specialist knowledge with linguistic skills.
Areas of application
MTPE is now well established and used in a number of areas and we explore two of these areas of application below:
IT and software localisation
Rapid adaptation is essential, particularly in software development and the roll-out of international applications. Thanks to MTPE, user interfaces, online help and release notes can be localised in record time. Machine translation provides an initial, context-sensitive version, which is then checked for terminology accuracy and usability by specialist IT translators during post-editing . This means that global users can access consistent and understandable texts without long waiting times.
E-commerce & marketing content
Online shops and global brands benefit enormously from MTPE. Product descriptions, social media posts, newsletters and landing pages need to be translated into multiple languages on a regular basis and MTPE makes it possible to quickly update large catalogues and publish SEO-optimised texts. Post-editing ensures that the brand voice and tone is consistent and maintained.
The other areas of application can be easily summarised in a compact list:
- Technical documentation: Manuals, maintenance instructions and safety data sheets are given the necessary precision.
- Legal and financial translations: Hybrid workflows with final legal review guarantee the highest level of reliability.
- Medical documents: Specialist texts such as study reports or patient information benefit from medically trained post-editors.
- Corporate communications: Internal memos, reports and presentations can be made available quickly with light post-editing.
Future prospects
The future of MTPE promises even more automated and intelligent processes. We outline two of the upcoming trends here:
With automated quality monitoring, post-editors will receive support from AI tools that evaluate readability, style and technical terminology in real time. Such systems provide immediate feedback, suggest corrections and prioritise critical passages – much like an editing plugin in word processing programmes, but specialised for MTPE workflows.
In addition, adaptive MT engines are being developed that automatically adapt to company-specific terminology and editorial guidelines. By continuously learning from post-editing results, they improve the raw quality in the long term, further reducing the need for human intervention. In the long term, this will lead to even greater integration of machine translation with post-editing into the global content lifecycle.
Other important trends in machine translation:
- Real-time collaboration: Platforms where post-editors and MT engines work together.
- Advanced AI consulting services: Advice on strategy, tool selection and ROI calculation.
- Cross-language AI models: Models that can process multiple languages simultaneously, thereby efficiently bundling projects.
What Alphatrad offers
Alphatrad has over 40 years of experience and more than 40 branches across Europe:
- MTPE in almost all language combinations: German ↔ English, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Russian and many more.
- Customised post-editing strategies: From light post-editing for internal documents to full post-editing for publications.
- Fast quotation phase: Non-binding MTPE quotation within 24 hours.
You will benefit from our expertise in machine translation and post-editing, as well as our passion for accurate human translation.
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FAQ about MTPE
What is the difference between MTPE and human translation?
The main difference lies in the process: in human translation, the entire text is created from start to finish by a professional translator. With MTPE on the other hand, AI first generates the text, which is then revised by a human post-editor. MTPE thus offers a more efficient solution for larger volumes of text, while human translation remains useful, especially for particularly creative or sensitive content such as marketing texts or legal documents.
What kind of content is MTPE suitable for?
MTPE is ideal for technical documentation, operating instructions, product descriptions, internal communication and standardised content with a high recognition value. In particular it provides an excellent solution, when large amounts of text need to be available quickly. It is important to note that the more structured and consistent the source text is, the better the machine translation result will be – and the less correction work will be required in post-editing.
How much time and money can be saved with MTPE?
Depending on the project, MTPE can save up to 50% of the time and 30–40% of the costs compared to full human translation. However, the specific benefits depend on factors such as the source text, language combination and desired quality level.
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