Post-editing of Technical Terms based on Bilingual Example Sentences

As technical fields become ever more specialized, and with continuous emergence of novel technical terms, it may not be always possible to avail of bilingual experts in the field to perform translation. This paper investigates the performance of bilingual non-experts in Computer-Assisted Translation. The translators were asked to identify and correct errors in MT output of technical terms in patent materials, aided only by example bilingual sentences. Targeting English-to-Chinese translation, we automatically extract the example sentences from a bilingual corpus of English and Chinese patents. We identify the most frequent translation candidates of a term, and then select the most relevant example sentences for each candidate according to semantic similarity. Even when given only two example sentences for each translation candidate, the non-expert translators were able to post-edit effectively, correcting 67.2% of the MT errors while mistakenly revising correct MT output in only 17% of the cases. © 2023 The authors.