A Report On Post-editing Of RAW Machine Translation Of The Final Civil Judgment Of Sinochem International (Overseas) Pte.Ltd.v. Thyssenkrupp Metallurgical Products Gmbh

The Belt and Road Initiative boosts trade between China and countries along the land and sea-based routes,thus creating increasingly greater demands of good quality and efficient translation services in the legal translation market.Meanwhile,the rapid development of machine translation technology in recent years has opened up more possibilities for translating legal documents in a timely and efficient manner.To study the application of machine translation technology to the translation of judgments,the author selects The Final Civil Judgment of Sinochem International(Overseas)Pte.Ltd.v.ThyssenKrupp Metallurgical Products Gmbh as the source text for the present translation practice.The case involved in the judgment concerns a dispute between Sinochem International(Overseas)Pte.Ltd.and ThyssenKrupp Metallurgical Products Gmbh over the trade of petroleum coke.It is a guiding case released by the Supreme People’s Court for the work related to the Belt and Road Initiative.The issues of the case are whether there is a fundamental breach of contract and what laws shall apply to such international trade.The translation machine used in this project is Google Translate,which is based on the neural machine translation system that is technologically more developed than the traditional phrase-based system.After applying the source text to said translation tool,it is found that the program has performed relatively well in the translation of the judgment in terms of producing more idiomatic translation at the syntactic level and relatively accurate translation of legal jargons and argot.In this sense,it has provided human translators with a reference version and reduced simple and repetitive labor,thus facilitating translation speed to some extent.On the other hand,its output is far from being accurate,consistent,clear and/or professional.These problems arose out of the fact that the databases used to train the translation tool are not based on legal texts and that there are a great many syntactic and pragmatic differences between the paratactic Chinese language and the hypotactic English language.To improve the machine-generated translation up to professional standard,post-editing of such output is thus required.Under the guidance of five principles of legal translation and by employing such post-editing methods as substitution,pragmatic enrichment,and shifts in word sequence,the author post-edited the machine translation output and solved the translation problems so that the final output reached the quality standard of judgment translation.It is hoped that the translation and post-editing methods used by the author will provide legal translators and machine translation researchers with some inspirations.It is believed that with more new technologies being developed,in the near future machine translation can help legal translators perform their translation tasks more efficiently,and optimistically their quality will be up to professional expectation as well.