Translation Report On Post-editing: A Case Study Of Literate Community In Early Imperial China And Walls(excerpts)

With the development of computer aided translation,post-editing has become a hot topic in translation studies.This translation report is based on historical literature with an aim to enrich the practice and thinking of post-editing and promote the going-global strategy of Chinese culture.This translation report is based on English-Chinese translation of the excerpts of two books on historical literature,Literate Community in Early Imperial China and Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick.Literate Community in Early Imperial China,written by Charles Sanford,argues that there was meaningful text interaction in the northwest border area of China in the Han Dynasty through plenty of historical materials.The language is serious and argumentative.Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick,written by David Frey,tells about the important role of the walls in the establishment of civilization in ancient history.The language is light and narrative.Literate Community is informative while Walls is more literary.The two compensate each other in further displaying the reliability of machine translation and strengthening the thinking of the translation of historical literature.The source texts are read in depth and processed on the translation machine Déjà Vu.Due to machine’s neglecting the dynamic changes of context,some improper translations are found in machine translation in the process of post-editing.Adaptation theory is chosen to guide this practice.According to linguistic structure standard,these improper translations are divided into the lexical level which includes anaphora,words’ specification and metaphor,and the syntactic level which includes comparative structure.Through corpus statistics and analysis,it is found that these improper translations can be classified into three categories: vagueness,ambiguity and mistake.Under the guidance of adaptation theory,the linguistic structure,the mental world and the social world are adapted to solve the problem with the consideration of various contextual factors.In this translation report,a case study of 50 examples is made to further clarify that these improper translations can be corrected by dynamically adapting to the necessary contextual factors in post-editing,so as to achieve the best communicative effect of translation.Upon the completion of the translation task,the author revises and improves the translation with the opinions and suggestions offered by the supervisor and peers in some necessary discussions.This report consists of six chapters.Chapter One briefly introduces the purpose and significance of the translation project,the content of the source texts and the reasons for choosing the texts.Chapter Two describes the process of translation practice: pre-translation,while-translation and post-editing.Chapter Three gives a brief introduction to the theoretical basis of this translation report and its theoretical value in dealing with post-editing problems as well as the theoretical framework put forward in this paper.Chapter Four is the preliminary classification and analysis of the collected corpus.Chapter Five centers around a case study,that is to say,under the guidance of adaptation theory,the post-editor needs to make dynamic adaptation to the linguistic structure,mental world and social world to achieve the best communicative effect.Chapter Six summarizes the main findings and shortcomings of this translation practice,and it also puts forward the suggestions for future translators.