A Case Study On The Application Of Machine Translation+Post-Editing In Contract Translation

Machine translation is playing an increasingly significant role in today's translation activities.It helps promote efficiency in translation activities,especially in contract translation.However,the output of machine translation still needs to be post-edited by translators for there are some limitations in language processing for machine translation.Based on a Share Purchase Agreement translation project,this paper discusses machine translation's advantages and disadvantages in contract translation,and finds out that machine translation can help save translators' time and provide translators with a rough but understandable version of the source text.However,machine translation cannot properly process proper nouns,less common terms and synonym clusters,analyze the internal logical relationship of clauses and keep the consistency of the original.To solve the above problems,this paper suggests three post-editing methods: lexical errors' correction,logic rectification and style changes.Lexical errors' correction consists of using search engine to check for proper nouns and less common terms,and using synonym for replacement.Logic rectification refers to reorganizing sentences to keep with the original logic.Style changes can be divided into using formal language and sentence transformation to keep consistent with the style of the original.It is hoped that this paper will provide translators who use machine translation as an aid to translate contracts with some post-editing strategies.