A Post-editing Report On The Chinese Translation Of The Captain’s Logbook From The Perspective Of Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory

With the revival of the shipping industry,more and more people become interested in the life at sea.This translation report takes the Captain’s logbook by Sri Lankan writer John de Silva for machine translation and analyzes some typical cases in the process.It might help popularize maritime culture,and inform theories and practice of machine translation and the post-editing.This translation report adopts Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory to guide the translation on YICAT online translation platform.The preface and the first two chapters are selected for the practice.On this basis,this paper analyzes the types of errors in machine translation at both lexical and syntactic levels,and then summarizes the corresponding post-editing strategies.The results show that,at the lexical level,quality of machine translation is affected by mistranslation of terms,abbreviations,conjunctions,pronouns and mistranslation of multiple meanings of words,at the syntactic level,machine translation has problems in voices and word order,etc.Guided by Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory,this paper adopts post-editing strategies such as contextual selection,logical reduction,specifying pronouns and class-shifts for errors at the lexical level,and structure-shifts,unit-shifts and order adjustment for errors at the syntactic level.The types of errors and post-editing strategies summarized in this paper might provide a useful reference for translation work in related fields.