Pre-editing is the process whereby a human prepares a document before applying

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates th ...

. The main goal of pre-editing is to reduce the post-editing workload by adapting the source document to improve the raw output of the machine translation. Pre-editing could be also valuable for human translation projects since it can increase the application of the

translation memory A translation memory (TM) is a database that stores "segments", which can be sentences, paragraphs or sentence-like units (headings, titles or elements in a list) that have previously been translated, in order to aid human translators. The translati ...

. In general, pre-editing is worth to apply when there are more than three target languages. In this case, pre-editing should facilitate the process of machine translation by spell and grammar checking, avoiding complex or ambiguous syntactic structure, and verifying term consistency. However, it is also applicable to poorly-converted files.Combining pre-editing and post-editing to improve SMT of user-generated content
Gerlach J., Porro V., Bouillon P., Lehmann S., in: Proceedings of the Machine Translation Summit XIV, Nice, France, 2013. Linguistic pre-editing is more important than pre-editing of the format since errors can affect machine translation quality.

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