To be or not to be: a translation reception study of a literary text
  translated into Dutch and Catalan using machine translation
Ana Guerberof Arenas Antonio Toral
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.