A Practice And Research On The Post-Editing Of Chinese-English Machine Translation From The Perspective Of Three-Dimensional Transformations

This report is based on the practice of the Chinese-English machine translation postediting project of Global Tone Communication Technology Co.,Ltd.The texts are Chinese local records which are initially translated on the YEEKIT machine translation platform of GTCOM,and then edited by translators.In the post-editing process,the machinetranslated text is found to have problems including mechanically copying the sentence patterns,lacking the cultural connotations and failing to convey the communicative intentions.These problems are edited accordingly.Based on the three-dimensional transformations of Eco-Translatology,this report analyzes specific problems in Chinese-English machine translation on one hand,and explains how the theory guides the post-editing on the other hand.In this theory,translation is summarized as the three-dimensional transformations including the adaptive and selective transformation focused on the linguistic,cultural and communicative dimensions.The analyses of sentence components and discourses,cultural contexts and their embodiment in the machine translation,and the communicative intentions and their transmission are conducted under this theory.Post-editing strategies are concluded as follows.Firstly,as for the linguistic dimension,sentence patterns can be converted flexibly at the syntactic level,and grammatical and lexical cohesive means can be used to improve logical connectivity and semantic coherence at the textual level.Secondly,in respect of the cultural dimension,this project adopts the strategies of literal translation with annotation as well as domestication for the historical-cultural context and the customary-cultural context that the machine translation does not involve.Thirdly,as for the communicative dimension,the strategy of semantic translation can be adopted to solve the problem that machine translation cannot involve the communicative intentions of the numbers and pronunciations of Chinese words.Besides,the annotated literal translation can be applied to deliver the communicative intentions related to denotations.This report is expected to enrich the post-editing strategies of local records in machine translation and provide possible directions for the future translation research of local records from the perspective of the three-dimensional transformations.