Cohesion-Oriented Post-Editing Strategies On English Popular Science Texts

The rapid advancement of information technology and artificial intelligence has propelled the substantial progress of machine translation technology.This development has earned recognition from both the translation industry and its customers and has established itself as a crucial tool in assisting translation.Machine translation(MT)has the capability to rapidly process an enormous amount of text,which in turn provides substantial savings in time and labor costs for translation tasks.However,the machine translation output is prone to lower accuracy and weaker contextual cohesion.To address these issues,machine translation plus post-editing(MT+PE)has emerged as a widely employed translation model in the industry.This model allows for high-quality translations to be achieved,whilst enhancing translation efficiency.The present report features an excerpted translated text derived from a concise and logically structured article on the concept of “self” within the field of psychology,originally found in a widely-read popular science book.The translation process utilized the “machine translation and post-editing” mode,with Deep L serving as the translation tool.The post-editing process encountered numerous difficulties stemming from the mechanical literal translation and deficient coherence in the machine translation version.The resulting translated text was fraught with issues in contextual connectivity and sometimes included logical errors.To address these concerns,the author draws upon the cohesion theory,utilizing Halliday and Hassan’s classification approach to articulate different strategies for post-editing based on the classification of cohesive devices.This analysis provides valuable insight for future translation practice.Taking the translation project as its starting point,this report introduced the specific content of the translation project and conducted textual analysis on the source text.It provided a detailed description of the translation process in the pre-translation,while-translation,and post-translation stages.Based on the “machine translation +post-editing” mode as well as Halliday and Hassan’s cohesion theory,this report conducted case analysis on the source text from four aspects: reference,conjunction,lexical cohesion and substitution and ellipsis.Based on the analysis results of the report,it summarized the post-editing strategies of different cohesion means and pointed out their shortcomings and directions for improvement.