A Report On The Translation Of What Every Driver Must Know(Excerpt) With CAT Tools

This translation report is based on the translation practice of What Every Driver Must Know.The selected translation parts are Chapter 4 and 5 of What Every Driver Must Know issued by the State of Michigan,which are concerned with traffic rules,signs,road markings and traffic signals.The basic hypothesis of this translation report is that for the limitations of human brain and paper printed dictionaries,it is necessary for translators to turn to electronic tools,online corpus,and translation memory in the CAT tools.And without the aid of human translators,machine translation can't produce a high-quality translation,it is necessary for translators to post-edit the result from online machine translation such as Google or Sogou translation according to the error types of machine translation.At the same time,the translator will list some effective searching tools,electronic tools,online corpus,various machine translations,cloud translation collaboration platforms,and various computer-assisted translation tools to prove it possible to apply CAT tools into the translation practice by fully making use of productivity and reusability from CAT tools and MT.For computer-aided translation scholars,goal-related theoretical computer-aided translation studies deserve serious academic attention.The authors will prove it with case analysis.This report is mainly divided into four parts.The first part is the task description of the translation project which introduces the background information,purpose statement,significance,the workflow of the translation project and the structure of the translation report.In the second part,the report will cover three stages of translation,such as pre-translation stage,translation stage and after translation stage.It will explain what types of CAT tools,electronic tools,machine translations,and post-edition tools are necessary for the translation practice to make use of productivity from MT(machine translation)and reusability from TM(translation memories)and TB stored in the computer-aided translation system.All these will prove that it is possible and necessary to use CAT tools in the translation practice.The third part uses examples,citations,and comparisons to prove that the translation suggestions from electronic tools,translation memory,online corpus,and machine translation need to be post-edited by human translators to ensure the acceptable translation product.For memory from the human brain,databases in the computer,translation memory from the online corpus,and suggestions from machine translation are not always available and reliable,so translators must make a right decision according to their own judgment.The machine can serve Human beings,it can't replace human.The conclusion part summarizes the report.First,using CAT tools is a necessary quality for modern translators.Secondly,various computer-assisted translation technologies make it possible to apply CAT tools into the translation project.Lastly,computer-assisted translation still has some shortcomings in translation practices.For example,if translation memories and terminologies have not been reviewed by reviewers,the accuracy of translation cannot be assured.Therefore,when translators use suggestions from translation memories(TM),especially from machine translation,they must be cautious.Through this report,the author expects more translators to use CAT tools in their translation practice,and compared with MT,The CAT is more reliable.