A Report On The Post-Editing Of Machine-Translated Medical Research Papers In The Lancet Based On The CEA Framework

Since the COVID-19 outbreak,SARS-Co V-2 infection as well as its prevention and treatment has received widespread attention from society.In order to better meet the public’s need for reliable sources of information,it is urgent to translate medical research papers in authoritative international journals and introduce them to the Chinese public in a more authentic form.The author translated two medical research papers in The Lancet for geekheal.com and reviewed this translation project systematically.Based on research into machine translation post-editing and the analytical framework of Comprehension-Expression-Adaptation(CEA),the report evaluates the common mistakes made by machine translation in the project and summarizes some public-oriented post-editing strategies for medical texts.Machine translation may make mistakes in proper nouns,professional concepts,core information,expression,logic and Europeanization.To address these problems,post-editing or retranslating can be conducted from three levels.On the level of comprehension,the post-editor should correctly comprehend proper nouns,terms,medical concepts and clarify their connotations.Any ambiguity caused by polysemes should be eliminated.The logic and core information should also be clarified and contextual information should be fully leveraged.On the level of expression,the post-editor should examine the accuracy of the content,the fluency of expression,and the integrity of structures and logic.Flawed expressions and logic should be reorganized,and Europeanized Chinese should be avoided.On the level of adaptation,the content can be more acceptable to the public by means of annotation,substitution,omission,and addition,while the form can be more concise and easier to be understood by strategies of word order adjustment,sentence segmentation and paragraph reorganization.