The Pre-editing Strategies For Online Fantasy Literary Works And Their Effectiveness

This paper aims to find out the principle and some consistent strategies to pre-edit Chinese online Fantasy literary works so that their machine output,with only a few acceptable errors,could be directly published on the online reading platform for international readers.The research shows machine translation has two defects.First,the machine does not embody many quality data regarding the translation of these expressions.Also,the machine is not familiar with the Chinese sentence structures used in online literary works.Second,the priority of the machine is to finish its translation task,not to ensure the quality of the output.Thus,when the machine is forced to translate phrases or sentence structures unfamiliar to it,it will either pick out one translation with the highest possibility or slice it to smaller operational units and assemble them linearly once each part is translated.At the syntactical level,if the machine is unable to tell the subject or the object,it will just follow closely the source text.These defects render mistranslation and grammar mistakes the two most common errors that occurred in the output.This paper proposes that we shall not let the machine bear the risk of translating unfamiliar or unknown things.Generally,it means rewriting the source text in two aspects.For format,the source text should be rewritten in English grammar.For content,any expressions specific to Chinese readers(e.g.,four-character idioms)should be changed into non-literary expressions.With the principle of externalization and these concrete pre-editing strategies,this paper rewrites the source text of 12,794 words in three hours.The error analysis shows that the machine output,after pre-editing,can pass the test with far lower penalty scores,368,while the threshold value is 1,386.It thus proves the effectiveness of the pre-editing strategies.