The Influence Of Reference To The Source Text On The Post-editing Efficiency

Machine translation post-editing(MTPE)is the mainstream translation production mode nowadays,and how to improve the efficiency of MTPE becomes an important topic in the field of translation studies.MTPE efficiency refers to a high-quality completion of post-editing tasks in a short time.Based on an English-to-Chinese post-editing experiment conducted on student translators,this report explores whether reference to the source text influences the post-editing efficiency of student translators.The subjects of this experiment are primarily MTI and English major student translators,and the selected text is an article from WHO,belonging to the news genre and involving medical content.This experiment employs the Deep L translation engine.The subjects are divided into group A and group B.Whether to refer to the source text is the independent variable in the experiment.The data analysis results show that for medical news genre,machine translation systems still produce a variety of translation errors,making it difficult to completely break away from the source text for post-editing.This article summarizes common errors in machine translation,which can help translators quickly locate errors and improve MTPE efficiency.Meanwhile,the MTPE competence and information literacy of student translators also have a great impact on the MTPE efficiency.Universities should set up MTPE courses to cultivate students’ MTPE competence and information literacy.This experimental report explores how translators can refer to the source text to do post-editing on machine-translated texts in order to improve translation efficiency.The conclusions of the experiment is of some future MTPE research and provide some insight for setting up post-editing courses in universities.