The Application Of Post-editing To A Machine Translated Educational Monograph

In recent years,machine translation has received extensive attention among scholars and the related fields.Machine translation has greatly improved the efficiency of translation,comparing with the human translation.However,machine translation output cannot fully reflect the situational and cultural context.Therefore,the quality of machine translation is still widely questioned.As an important step in the machine translation process,post-editing attempts to further revising the machine translation output.It thus is an effective measure to improve the quality and accuracy of machine translation output.However,there are still a limited number of previous studies concerning the integration of machine translation and post-editing.The translation project combines the machine translation with post-editing and reported the translation practice based on the educational monograph Doing Triangulation and Mixed Methods.It summarized the main error types of machine translation and effective strategies for post-editing.The differences between the quality of machine translation and post-editing were further discussed according to a comparative analysis.The major findings were as follows.First,based on previous research,the error types of machine translation for the educational monograph included inappropriate translations at the lexical,syntactical,formatting and cultural levels.Inappropriate translations at the lexical level mainly refer to inappropriate translation of terminologies and parts of speech.Inappropriate translations at the syntactic level refer to wrong collocation and inappropriate sequence of sentence segments.Inappropriate format mainly involves punctuations and fonts while cultural issues mainly involve improper translation of cultural phenomena and unfitting language expressions.Second,the results indicated that using appropriate post-editing strategies can effectively improve the quality of machine translation.These strategies include proper adjustment of word order,conversion of parts of speech,addition or deletion of machine translation output.Based on the case analysis,the study indicated that post-editing of machine translation output can improve translation efficiency,and further correct its inappropriate translations,such as over-translation,word missing,mistranslation and errors of terminology translation.By adding connecting words and adjusting the word order,the post-edited translation output can be more natural,fluent and logical.For post-editing,the translator can also add the situational and cultural context to help readers better understand the translation.Based on the current international standards for post-editing of machine translation output and previous research,this study postulated an initial framework for categorizing machine translation errors during the post-editing process.According to the case study and comparative analysis,the differences between machine translation output and post-edited translation output in the process of English to Chinese translation of the educational monographs were also explained.The study provided typical cases analysis and related suggestions for post-editing practice based on machine translation.