The effectiveness of online queries in machine translation post-editing

This paper explores the process of machine translation post-editing (MTPE) carried out by a group of Chinese students of Spanish L2 (B2 level) as well as the analysis of the online resources used in the MTPE. Keylogger and BBflashback screen recording techniques were used to quantify the students' pause time, post-editings and online queries in the MTPE process. The results show that despite the pause time to check online resources is very long, the quality of the post-editing (PE) is worse than original MT. Taking into account that foreign language students use MT increasingly, there is an urgent need to include in foreign language training specific competences to identify and correct machine translation mistakes.