Abstract
This article presents the results of a study involving the translation of a
short story by Kurt Vonnegut from English to Catalan and Dutch using three
modalities: machine-translation (MT), post-editing (PE) and translation without
aid (HT). Our aim is to explore creativity, understood to involve novelty and
acceptability, from a quantitative perspective. The results show that HT has
the highest creativity score, followed by PE, and lastly, MT, and this is
unanimous from all reviewers. A neural MT system trained on literary data does
not currently have the necessary capabilities for a creative translation; it
renders literal solutions to translation problems. More importantly, using MT
to post-edit raw output constrains the creativity of translators, resulting in
a poorer translation often not fit for publication, according to experts.