An E-C Translation Report On The Memsource MT Errors Analysis And PE Strategies

With the rapid development of computer technology,machine translation(MT)has been widely applied among professional translators for it can sufficiently improve their efficiency.However,the limitations of machine translation are equally prominent.In order to ensure a balance between translation efficiency and quality,post-editing becomes an indispensable part in the machine-aided translation project.The author participated in the Cochrane Sinicization Project as volunteer translator and this report is based on the author’s long-term personal experiences of doing post-editing for Memsource translation.The source texts of this project are medical systematic reviews from the Cochrane.Memsource is the MT tool used in this translation project.Since the translation from English to Chinese concerns two completely different language families,the quality of MT is unsatisfactory,that is why translators need to make greater efforts in post-editing.The assignments undertaken by the author,were finally published on the Cochrane Chinese Collaboration website after multiple rounds of revisions.The author conducted an exhaustive comparison between the Memsource MT texts with the officially published PE translation version and has coded all the MT errors in a bottom-up manner.Typical error types generated by Memsource MT are then categorized into two broad types: linguistic and non-linguistic errors.Linguistic errors concern three categories,namely lexicon,syntax and text.Errors at lexical level include terminology mistakes,ambiguity,misinterpretation of parts of speech and redundancy of meanings.Errors at syntactic level are illogicality,confusion of sentence structures,loss of sentence elements and inappropriate word order.Errors at textual level mainly consists of lack of coherence and inconsistency in style.The non-linguistic dimension includes punctuation errors and the format-related errors which consist of errors in the number format,unit of measurement and format of statistics.Under the guideline of Science Translatology and the three principles “pragmatic value first,semantic meaning second and linguistic form last”,the author believes that the basic strategies of Complete Translation,namely,addition and reduction translation,transformation strategies and,split and combination translation,can provides practical post-editing solutions for Memsource MT errors.Hopefully,this study can make some clues for Cochrane Sinicization Project and feedback to the Memsource’s developers to help improve its operability.