The follow-up questionnaires tapped into students’ experiences with the actual translation and post-editing tasks (see Appendices 7 and 8). The two questionnaires shared some questions, which offers us the opportunity to compare some experiences of translators and post-editors. Both groups were asked how difficult they found the task in general, then in terms of terminology, thematic knowledge and syntax. The findings indicate that most aspects of the task were rated neither too difficult nor too easy (that is, of about average difficulty) by both groups. The only exception seems to be syntactic difficulty, which was evaluated as difficult (mean value around 4) by both groups. The independent samples t-tests showed no significant differences between human translators and post-editors (Table 13), suggesting that the subjective experience of the two groups is very similar.

 

 

To check whether the perceived difficulty of the various aspects of the tasks differed significantly, a repeated measures one-way ANOVA was carried out both in the HT and the PE group. In the human translator group, the Mauchly’s test indicated that the assumption of sphericity had been met (χ2(2)=2.189, p=.335). The repeated measures one-way ANOVA showed that some mean values differed statistically significantly (F(2, 18) = 9.774, p = 0.001). Post hoc analysis with a Bonferroni adjustment revealed that human translators perceived the task to be significantly more demanding from terminological aspects (M = 3.47) than from the perspective of required background knowledge (M = 2.93, p<.05). In the same way, the task was evaluated to be significantly more difficult syntactically (M=3.87), than from the perspective of required background knowledge (M = 2.93 p<0.01). No significant difference was found between terminological and syntactic difficulty. Results of pairwise comparisons can be found in Appendix 9., First data collection wave (first-year students).