Assessing the quality of post-edited wildlife documentaries

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article presents the results of an experiment to assess the quality of post-edited wildlife documentary films to be voiced-over and off-screen dubbed, which was compared to the quality of human translation. The hypothesis of the article is that there are no significant differences between translated and post-edited texts in terms of quality. Twelve MA students translated and post-edited two excerpts of an English wildlife documentary into Spanish. Six professional translators then assessed both the translations and post-edited texts by: (1) grading the documents, (2) correcting them using a Multidimensional Quality Metrics-based error classification that takes into account documentary translation specificities, and (3) answering questionnaires on their impressions. The results confirm the hypothesis by indicating that the quality of post-edited and translated wildlife documentary films is significantly similar.