Applying MTPE to Sworn Translation: Bonus or Burden?

This article reports on a study that aimed to investigate the productivity of machine translation post-editing (MTPE) applied to the sworn translation of personal documents. More specifically, it aimed at describing some of the challenges of post-editing birth certificates and ID cards from Brazilian Portuguese into American English, as well as analyzing the time spent on the MTPE of such documents in comparison to manually translating them. The methodology consisted of timed and annotated translation using MTPE and human translation (HT). It also included the description of elements and final formatting that is characteristic of sworn translation. The PDF files were converted to Word using an OCR software. Our results indicated that MTPE might be more productive than HT when time spent on OCR and formatting is not considered. However, since the sample size was limited to eight documents and two types of documents, the results cannot be generalized.