To be or not to be: a translation reception study of a literary text translated into Dutch and Catalan using machine translation

Abstract: This article presents the results of a study involving the reception of a fictional story by Kurt Vonnegut translated from English into Catalan and Dutch in three conditions: machine-translated (MT), post-edited (PE) and translated from scratch (HT). 223 participants were recruited who rated the reading conditions using three scales: Narrative Engagement, Enjoyment and Translation Reception. The results show that HT presented a higher engagement, enjoyment and translation reception in Catalan if compared to PE and MT. However, the Dutch readers show higher scores in PE than in both HT and MT, and the highest engagement and enjoyments scores are reported when reading the original English version. We hypothesize that when reading a fictional story in translation, not only the condition and the quality of the translations is key to understand its reception, but also the participants reading patterns, reading language, and, perhaps language status in their own societies.