# Smarter edits? Post-editing with error highlights and translation suggestions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21135 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21135/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Large Language Models Are State-of-the-Art Evaluators of Translation Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14520/) (2023)
- [xCOMET: Transparent Machine Translation Evaluation through Fine-grained Error Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10482/) (2023)
- [GEMBA-MQM: Detecting Translation Quality Error Spans with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13988/) (2023)
- [Error Span Annotation: A Balanced Approach for Human Evaluation of Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11580/) (2024)
- [Leveraging GPT-4 for Automatic Translation Post-Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14878/) (2023)
- [OpenKiwi: An Open Source Framework for Quality Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08646/) (2019)
- [(Perhaps) Beyond Human Translation: Harnessing Multi-Agent Collaboration for Translating Ultra-Long Literary Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11804/) (2024)
- [Translating Step-by-Step: Decomposing the Translation Process for Improved Translation Quality of Long-Form Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06790/) (2024)
- [xTower: A Multilingual LLM for Explaining and Correcting Translation Errors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19482/) (2024)
- [QE4PE: Word-level Quality Estimation for Human Post-Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03044/) (2025)
- [Are AI agents the new machine translation frontier? Challenges and opportunities of single- and multi-agent systems for multilingual digital communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12891/) (2025)
- [Giving the Old a Fresh Spin: Quality Estimation-Assisted Constrained Decoding for Automatic Post-Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17265/) (2025)
- [Introducing Quality Estimation to Machine Translation Post-editing Workflow: An Empirical Study on Its Usefulness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16515/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As MT quality increases, interest in enhanced post-editing features such as QE-derived error highlights is growing, yet evidence for their usefulness remains limited. In this work, we explore the usefulness of LLM-derived error highlights and correction suggestions based on automatic post-editing (APE). We conduct a study where professional translators (En-Nl) post-edit translations using APE error highlights and correction suggestions and compare productivity, quality and user experience to regular PE and PE with QE-derived highlights. While no condition yielded productivity or quality gains compared to regular PE, APE highlights were better received than QE-derived highlights, and correction suggestions improved overall user experience.