Stylistically adapted literary machine translation: Contribution of a technically and ergonomically oriented perspective

This presentation delves into the second half of a project aiming to evaluate the feasibility and advantages of a custom MT system adapted to literary style. While the first half of the project adopted a technically-oriented perspective pointing to the conclusion that the integration of translator style significantly improved performance, especially in respect to features and challenges that are typically considered outside of the scope of machine translation, this second part of the project delves into the ergonomics of translation technologies, to consider the socio-cognitive aspects of the research. This paradigm shift follows a series of task-based interviews with an expert translator and coincide with the emergence of a number of position papers and surveys among professionals and literary translator's associations, which reinforce the ecological validity of this study and add new insight into the evaluation, real use cases and user perceptions that could have been otherwise obscured by a purely technical or quantitative approach. Indeed, the main takeaways from this interaction with the end user paint a stark contrast with the results solely based on the tool itself, and suggest new avenues in terms of uses and improvements for the tool, which align very well with the global evolution and trends of both the profession and translation tools over the course the last decades.