Human factors in machine translation and post-editing among institutional translators

In September 2015, the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology carried out a focus group study of 70 translators at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation (DGT). (1) The aim was to better understand the factors involved in the translators' adoption and non-adoption of machine translation (MT) during their translation tasks. Our analysis showed that, while broadly positive attitudes to MT could be observed, MT was not consistently adopted for all tasks. We argue that ergonomic factors related to a human translator's needs, abilities, limitations, and overall well-being heavily impacted on participants' decisions to use MT or not in their tasks. We further claim that it is only by taking into account the special institutional circumstances in which the activity of DGT translation is situated that these ergonomic factors can be fully understood and explained.