This document outlines the timeline of machine translation post-editing emerging as a profession from 1985 onwards. It discusses early works from 1985 that defined post-editing and acknowledged it as a rising profession. Many authors in the 1990s further recognized the role of post-editors in the translation industry. Key works that helped shape post-editing as a profession came from Krings in 2001 and Allen in 2003. The document also mentions important guidelines and training materials for post-editors produced by O'Brien and Torrejón & Rico in the early 2000s. Finally, it notes that the Post-Editing Special Interest Group established by the AMTA in 1998 was a milestone that advanced the field through several workshops.

1. MT Post-editing: a timeline

2. Dra. Celia Rico, Facultad de Artes y Comunicación, @celiaricoperez
- Special issue on MT in JosTrans
(issue 19, Jan 2013)
- A. Pym in Meta (58, 2013):
“Translation Skills-Sets in a Machine
Translation Age”
LSP offer the service
as a new value
10 articles published in
Multilingual (Jan. 2013 –
Nov. 2014)
Users of MT and mention to
post-editors introduced for the
first time in the research journal
Machine Translation (I. Garcia,
2011; S. O’Brien, 2011)
Special issue on MT
Post-editing in
Tradumatica (vol. 10,
2012)
Multiple debates
in online forums
Online courses
Job offers
Vasconcellos and León
reported on work
carried out at the Pan
American Health
Organization
“a rising profession”
(Arnold et al, 1994:
33-35; Clarck, 1994:
302; Somers, 1997;
Krings and Koby, 2001
Allen, 2003
O’Brien, 2002
Torrejón & Rico,
2002
Post-Editing Special
Interest Group set up by
AMTA
WPTP/AMTA
O’Brien, 2003-2011
Specia, 2009-2011
Guerberof, 2009-2012
TAUS PE Guidelines , 2010

3. Relevant literature declaring post-editing (PE) as a profession on its own can be traced back to
1985, when Vasconcellos and León reported on work carried out at the Pan American Health
Organization. MT had been implemented some years earlier for translating from Spanish into
English, with a productivity of 4,000 to 10,000 words a day per post-editor (Vasconcellos and
León, 1985: 134). PE was then defined as «adjusting the machine output so that it reflects as
accurately as possible the meaning of the original text, [with an emphasis on] adjusting
relatively predictable difficulties» (Vasconcellos, 1987: 411). Since then, many other authors
acknowledged the use of the term post-editor and, thus, its specific role in the translation
industry as a rising profession (Arnold et al, 1994: 33-35; Clarck, 1994: 302; Somers, 1997;
among others). PE was definitely shaped with two main contributions on the subject: Krings’
(Krings and Koby, 2001) and Allen’s (Allen, 2003). The former approached the topic from a
psycholinguistic perspective, thoroughly analyzing the process of post-editing and comparing
the associated cost and effort with conventional human translation. As for Allen’s work, it was a
practical introduction to PE for translators, with specific mention of guidelines, types, levels and
actual examples of PE in context. On a more didactic side, it is also worth mentioning the
proposals of O’Brien (O’Brien, 2002) and Torrejón and Rico (Torrejón and Rico, 2002) which
focus on post-editing guidelines, training and skills development. Finally, this brief outlook on PE
as a profession along time would not be complete without a reference to the Post-Editing
Special Interest Group set up by some members of the AMTA in 1998, which marked a
milestone at the time and led to several workshops for some years […].
An extract from Skills and Profile of the New Role of the Translator as MT Post-editor:
http://revistes.uab.cat/tradumatica/article/view/18/
Dra. Celia Rico, Facultad de Artes y Comunicación, @celiaricoperez