A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Great Barrier Reef

With the development of machine translation technology,the quality of translation has been improved greatly.However,human involvement is still indispensable which constitutes pre-editing of the source text and the post-editing of the machine translated version.Based on the E-C translation practice of chapters 6-8 of The Great Barrier Reef: An Environmental History,this paper attempts to figure out some practical pre-editing measures for marine scientific texts in the hope of enriching the study of pre-editing and providing some reference for improving machine translation quality in terms of accuracy.In addition,the 21 st century is the century of the ocean,and it is undoubted that the translation of works on marine science will be of high referential value for the sustainability of our marine resources to build China into a marine power.The book,The Great Barrier Reef: An Environmental History,documents and illustrates the main human impacts on various living organisms in the Great Barrier Reef from 1860 to 1960 based on extensive archival and oral evidences.The translation of it will provide reference for reasonable exploitation and warnings against depletion of our marine resources.In terms of pre-editing,what and how to edit are the main concerns.The selection of pre-editing objects mainly depends on the translator’s knowledge about the differences between the source and the target language and their conversion in combination with the context of the source text so as to spot those expressions that are speculatively troublesome for machine translation.Through comparing the machine translation text before and after the pre-editing,this paper researches into the pre-editing measures for three language phenomena: terms,high frequency content words problematic for machine work and some syntactic structures with certain key words as the handle.For the translation of terms,it can be solved by establishing a terminology database with all proper nouns and terms included to ensure the accuracy and consistency of terminology translation.For the translation of high frequency problematic words,it can be solved by adding categorical words,substituting synonyms or near-synonyms to avoid wrong translation.For the translation of certain syntactic structures,it can be solved by reference re-placement,word order adjusting,long sentence splitting or rewriting to avoid the obstacles of machine recognition.The purpose of pre-editing is to improve the accuracy and efficiency of machine translation and reduce the post-editing workload by solving ambiguity and increasing recognition of machine translation.Without any doubt,weaknesses in the report are inevitable due to the writer’s limited ability and her first inquiry into machine translation.It is earnestly expected that this paper can stimulate more research on machine translation technology for constant improvement on translation quality to meet the demand for explosive information exchange worldwide.