With or without you? Effects of using machine translation to write flash fiction in the foreign language

The improvement in the quality of machine translation (MT) for both majority and minority languages in recent years is resulting in its steady adoption. This is not only happening among professional translators but also among users who occasionally find themselves in situations where translation is required or MT presents itself as a easier means to producing a text. This work sets to explore the effect using MT has in flash fiction produced in the foreign language. Specifically, we study the impact in surface closeness, syntactic and lexical complexity, and edits. Results show that texts produced with MT seem to fit closer to certain traits of the foreign language and that differences in the use of part-of-speech categories and structures emerge. Moreover, the analysis of the post-edited texts reveals that participants approach the editing of the MT output differently, displaying a wide range in the number of edits.