Compensation And Improvement Of MT By Post-editing

Machine translation is booming today,and its development results in a large number of computer-aided translation products.These tools can be used without grasp of another language,so people can get access to them easily.Though its development is now at a high speed,human translators still cannot be replaced.Machine translation has saved time and efforts for human workers with its speedy translation process.However,human work is still indispensable for its accuracy and professionalism.Texts translated by machine may be integrated in structure,but they are fragmented in meaning.Machine translation is operated through coded procedures and with the help of corpora,so its translation text is produced in a word-for-word way.Some words and sentences can be translated thoroughly,but their meanings are twisted in the translation process.And there are some intricate things that machine is not able to fulfill in its coded translation,such as annotation,further explanation,Chinese style of expression,etc.All of these drawbacks make machine translated texts not perfect enough for targeted readers to read and understand.The book The Language War,written by an American linguistic professor Robin Tolmach Lakoff,refers to some social issues and phenomena in the US.This book may not be hard for American people to read,but for Chinese readers it can be a little confusing,particularly with its quotations and idioms.So post-editing is a must after machine translation for this book.In post-editing process,meanings that are not fully conveyed though machine translation can be supplemented and reorganized.Human translators can find out loss through comparison between the original text and machine translated text.Then some compensation techniques can be used to polish and improve the quality of machine translated text.