A Report On Machine Translation Post-Editing Of Medical Texts From The Lancet

Between July 2019 and January 2021,the author provided English-Chinese translation service for The Lancet family of journals.During translation,the author explored the emerging model of machine translation post-editing(MTPE).This report is written to summarize the author’s observations on MTPE when applied to the medical fieldFollowing the "Comprehension,Expression and Adaptation"(CEA)framework proposed by Li Changshuan(2020),this report will analyze the features of medical translation,weaknesses and strengths of MTPE application to medical texts,and PE tactics that can be adopted.The section on comprehension covers understanding of background knowledge,specialty terms and logic;the expression section includes rendition of terminology,polysemy and synonyms,underlying logic,sentence structures,and the expression of dense information from long and complex sentences;the adaptation section covers the adjustments in the form,redundancy and vagueness,temporal words,and errors in source textsDuring the practice of translation based on MTPE,it was found that machine translation still is subject to mistakes on many fronts and post-editing by human translators is essential for the quality of translation.The mode of MTPE can leverage the advantages of both machine translation(efficiency)and human translators(quality).Throughout the project,the author gained significant progress in critical thinking,analytical ability and investigation skills.