Post-editing (or postediting) is the process whereby humans amend machine-generated translation to achieve an acceptable final product.
Post-edited text may afterwards be revised to ensure the quality of the language choices are proofread to correct simple mistakes.
Post-editing involves the correction of machine translation output to ensure that it meets a level of quality negotiated in advance between the client and the post-editor.
Machine translation left the labs to start being used for its actual purpose in the late seventies at some big institutions such as the European Commission and the Pan-American Health Organization, and then, later, at some corporations such as Caterpillar and General Motors.
Light post-editing implies minimal intervention by the post-editor, with the aim of ensuring quality is "good enough" or "understandable";[6] the expectation is that the client will use it for inbound purposes only, often when the text is needed urgently, or has a short time span.
Full post-editing involves a greater level of intervention to achieve a degree of quality to be negotiated between client and post-editor; the expectation is that the outcome will be a text that is not only understandable but presented in some stylistically appropriate way, so it can be used for assimilation and even for dissemination, for inbound and for outbound purposes.
[6] The assumption, however, has been that it takes less effort for translators to work directly from the source text than to post-edit the machine generated version.
For some language pairs and some tasks, particularly if the source has been pre-edited, raw machine output may be good enough for gisting purposes without requiring subsequent human intervention.
[13] Professionals have also reported negative productivity gains where corrections require more time than to translate from scratch.