Advantages And Disadvantages Of Computer-aided Translation In The Translation Of Un Publications

As computer-aided translation?CAT?has made rapid progress in recent years,it is nothing new for translators.With a variety of multi-functional CAT tools adopted in translation projects,the value of language assets has been maximized and high quality and efficiency have been achieved in translation.Despite these advantages,disadvantages have also been found in CAT.This thesis discusses the application of Trados,a CAT tool,in the English-Chinese translation project of the 42^ndedition of Basic Facts about the United Nations by a student translator team from the Graduate of Institute of Interpretation and Translation,Shanghai International Studies University.In the thesis,two major difficulties faced by the team in the project have been summarized,i.e.how to maintain style consistency and term consistency in translation.Based on the comparison between the content in the translation memory of Trados and the final Chinese version of the Basic Facts about the United Nations,CAT is found to have played a role in overcoming the difficulties mentioned above.Limitations of CAT are also discussed from the perspective of cohesion and textual message delivery,and related solutions have been given in the thesis,i.e.making good usage of tags and returning to the original text.This thesis aims to prove that the advantages of CAT overweigh its disadvantages and the disadvantages can be overcome.Since UN publications share similar contents and the translation of those publications is usually completed by several or a group of translators,CAT tools are suggested to be adopted in UN publications translation projects for higher efficiency and consistency.