A Study On Errors From Google Translation Of Marketing Communications In Tourism Hospitality:Concepts,Strategies And Cases (Excerpts)

The developing information technologies facilitated the emergence of machine translation.In recent years,machine translation has basically gained recognition from the translation industries due to its high speed and low costs.However,in terms of the limitation on the translating mechanism is,the output generated from machine translation present similar and repetitive errors.Based on that,the post-editing of machine translation becomes a good way to improve the efficiency of machine translation.Therefore,this paper centers on regular mistranslations from Google Translate during post-editing.Guided by the Reiss' s Text Typology and TAUS's Post-editing Guidelines,two chapters in Marketing Communications in Tourism and Hospitality: Concepts,Strategies and Cases would be post-edited.During this practice,the author first post-edited the output of Google Translate,and subsequently,the author post-edited 1,000 sentence groups(4,262 sentence groups in total)to identify and note the possible mistranslation types,and the rest of sentence groups were treated in the same way to modify the mistranslation types based on the translation material,and finally,those typical mistranslations and their frequencies were presented in reference to the notes.Through this study,the author will not only be familiarized with the terms in the field of tourist translation and marketing communications,but provide experience for post-editing,and further the automatic process of post-editing and fully automatic machine translation.Through the detailed analysis,it is found that 74.8% of sentence groups are mistranslated,and therefore,there is still room for improvement for the E-C translation output of Google Translate.On the lexical level,translations concerning terms,abstract diction and polysemy are flawed,along with omission and redundancy,among which the mistranslations of terms account for 38.9%.On the syntactic level,most of word orders,nouns,verbs and prepositions and their phrases,participial structures and infinitives still remain to be defective,among which mistranslations about word orders account for 72.9%.On the semiotic level,mistranslations about punctuations,formats and numbers are of high frequency.However,due to the limited space,this paper mainly discussed the mistranslations about terms from the lexical level and mistranslations about word orders from the syntactic level.In this practice,a majority of mistranslations about terms is caused by the confusion between the specific meanings and general meanings of terms,the failure to identify proper nouns,and sometimes,inconsistency in terms within the context.And mistranslations about word orders should be given more attention when dealing with conjunctions,prepositions and prepositional phrases,participial structures and infinitives and clauses.Based on those findings,the author would share her post-editing experience in brief to further both the manual and automatic post-editing process,and eventually improving the translation quality of machine translation.With the expanding global integration and the surging translation demands worldwide,post-editing of machine translation will be standardized and professionalized,and finally take an increasingly important role in the higher efficiency of machine translation,even the whole translation industries.In order to achieve it,there will be a trend towards the combination of post-editing,machine translation and translation project management,and therefore,more focus should be brought to post-editing,including more researchers involved,more specialist research fields,and more practical guidelines summarized.