Post-Editese in Literary Translations

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I really enjoyed reading this article. As one of the people behind the introduction of the concept of Post-editese, I am very happy to see work in this area being conducted, for different texts and language combinations. I hope the present paper continues to spark interest in this field and leads to many more studies replicating and expanding the work. 

I believe the authors chose to study relevant features here, sufficiently rooted in related research. It is particularly interesting to see very different results for the two different texts, especially considering that the more 'creative' text exhibits fewer obvious 'Post-editese' characterstics. Plenty more future work to come, I can imagine!

For my more detailed evaluation, I refer to the PDF attachment containing my notes. The main questions/issues I identified are the following:

• The way 'convergence' by Baker is operationalised here. I feel like Baker meant something different, and I'm not sure if the way it has been interpreted here is completely accurate. I feel like this needs extra clarification/justification (see more specific notes in the PDF)
• Double-check the numbers in the tables and the text + table titles: I found some inconsistencies in the numbers refered to in the text as compared to those in the tables (can just be typos, but it would be good to check throughout), and sometimes the title of a table hasn't been updated to match the table itself. I also have questions about the PE average, as the numbers are not always the same as the actual average of the values for the 9 post-editors). I think some tables could benefit from additional bold values, while for others, it is not so obvious why certain values are in boldface. 
• Make significance / accuracy of certain numeric findings more explicit. Sometimes seemingly small numeric differences (0.01) are described as meaningful. I am not saying they are not, but I think it would be good to have additional justification of why these differences are indeed meaningful. In addition, I had some questions about the conclusions drawn from the table with the punctuation analysis (see PDF), as my reading of those numbers is different. 
• Language remarks: I'm not sure about the term 'test set', as this is very specific to Machine Learning, and means something else there. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

answer to the reviewer 1 is in the attached document

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors analyze the importance of post-editing automatically translated text, defining (or adapting) various hypotheses and then verifying them. For example, they try to find out if the post-edited versions are closer to human translations, automatic translations or even to the original version. They reach the conclusion that there are indeed relevant differences between versions, especially between different literary genres.

The article is well written, and I don't think there are any obvious flaws either in terms of methodology or hypotheses tested. Moreover, the authors themselves identify possible biases that may have affected the analysis, making the readers aware of them. The results seem consistent.

As far as this review is concerned, I think the article is quite well structured and written. I don't have big questions in terms of methodology and analysis either. There are some typos throughout the text (ignore them if you don't agree, as I'm not a native English speaker either). For the sake of ease, I opted to scan the document with my brief corrections and to attach it to this review.

Nonetheless, I would like to suggest, if the authors find it relevant, an analysis in terms of differences in POS tags between translation versions, alongside the other analyzes already carried out.

Moreover, despite being completely lateral to the work, the translator's own work can often be seen as an art or a craft; there are cases in literature where the translation is sometimes considered superior to the original.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We appreciate the valuable contribution to our work with very useful comments and suggestions. We addressed all typos identified one by one and sought to add all suggested changes where possible and where deemed relevant.