English-Chinese Post-editing Report Of Science Dissertations (Excerpt):Machine Translation Problems And Strategies At The Lexical And Syntactic Levels In The Science And Technology Text

With the advancement of the information age,translation-related computer technology is developing rapidly,giving birth to extensive computer-aided translation(CAT)and machine translation(MT)software and platforms.However,MT has numerous errors and problems while improving translation efficiency.The practice report selected six dissertations as MT text and post-edited them on the basis of MT problems,which are related to novel coronavirus and newly published in the Science,American journal.As the world-class famous natural science and comprehensive academic journal,Science would publish weekly papers and reports,which are the world’s most significant breakthroughs in science and technology.The content of practice material is the biomedical science and technology papers whose words have usability and functionality.What is more,these kinds of articles have common words,more technical terms,and a logical and careful flow of the text.After learning related knowledge and research on text,the author mainly rectified the errors that arose at the lexical and syntactical levels along with the characteristics of the MT system and translation quality standards.MT errors are in the proper nouns and conversion of speech in possessive nominalizations on the level of lexis.On the syntax level,the problems occur in the segmentation of sentence fragments,order adjustment,and statements’ logic and cohesion.For the realization of translation equivalence,Catford divided translation conversion into level shifts and category shifts.Level shifts are related to grammar and vocabulary,while category shifts include unit,structure,class and system shifts.To improve the quality of the MT version,the project applied class shifts to guide the post-editing(PE)of action words and nominalized structure and used the structural shifts and unit shifts of category shifts to instruct sentence post-editing.Guided by Catford’s shifts theory,the report explored practical translation skills in terms of medical English and post-editing by analyzing and modifying specific examples,expecting to provide some references and positive affect for the post-editing of machine-translated texts.