The effectiveness of consulting external resources during translation and postediting of general text types

Consulting external resources is an important aspect of the translation process. Whereas most previous studies were limited to screen capture software to analyze the usage of external resources, we present a more convenient way to capture this data, by combining the functionalities of CASMACAT with those of Inputlog, two state-of-the-art logging tools. We used this data to compare the types of resources used and the time spent in external resources for forty from-scratch translation sessions (HT) and forty post-editing (PE) sessions of ten master's students of translation (from English into Dutch). We took a closer look at the effect of the usage of external resources on productivity and quality of the final product. The types of resources consulted were comparable for HT and PE, but more time was spent in external resources when translating. Though search strategies seemed to be more successful when translating than when post-editing, the quality of the final product was comparable, and post-editing was faster than regular translation