The Impact Of Pre-Editing On The Overall Efficiency Of Chinese-to-English Translation

Pre-editing and post-editing are two major ways to improve translation quality in machine translation.Compared with post-editing,however,pre-editing is researched and applied on a much smaller scale.Based on quantitative and qualitative analysis,this research attempts to explore whether the "pre-editing + machine translation + post-editing" mode is more efficient than the traditional mode of "machine translation +post-editing" through an experiment and an interview.Eight subjects,who are graduate students majoring in translation and interpretation from Beijing Foreign Studies University,are recruited in the experiment to translate two texts with similar number of words and difficulty using Google Translation.Each subject modifies one text through post-editing and records his/her time spent on post-editing.Then each subject edits the other text using both pre-editing and post-editing strategies,and records his/her time spent on pre-editing and post-editing.The two translations of each subject are evaluated and scored by comparing to the quality standard.The time data of each subj ect whose translations have reached the standard is analyzed.After the experiment,the subj ects are interviewed about their opinions on the two translation modes.The research shows that most subjects spend less time in the mode of "pre-editing+ machine translation + post-editing" than in the mode of "machine translation + post-editing",which indicates that the former mode is more efficient for most subj ects.It is also found that subjects are generally positive about pre-editing.They hold that effective pre-editing can reduce the time spent on post-editing and thus improve overall translation efficiency.