’Quite puzzling when I first read it’: Is reading for literary translation different from reading for post-editing?

While research on literary machine translation has gained considerable momentum over the past few years, there is still wide agreement that, for the time being, machine-generated translations need to be followed by human post-editing to obtain publishable results. As a translatorial process, post-editing differs from translation from scratch on multiple levels. This contribution investigates one of those levels, i.e., the different ways in which translators and post-editors read and creatively engage with the source text, and how these differences are reflected in the final target texts. Drawing on cognitive stylistics and narratology frameworks, it is shown how translators and post-editors develop narrative understanding of the story, the characters, and the worlds evoked by the source text; how they infer meaning from the source text and its style and, for example, fill in blanks and gaps during their readings. The discussion is based on findings from a two-part empirical study in which five professional literary translators translated a short story by Ernest Hemingway into German and five different professional literary translators post-edited a machine-translated draft of the same story provided by DeepL. The participants were asked to think aloud while they worked on their task, and their think-aloud protocols were used to explore their reading processes.