Machine Translation Errors And Post-Editing Methods

This translation report focuses on the Chinese-English translation of academic texts under the mode of “machine translation + post-editing”.The source text is Chapter Four of New Perspectives on Geography of Media written by Professor Shao Peiren of Zhejiang University.In the source text,the concept of space is first studied from the perspective of Geography of Media,and the relationship between media and space is discussed in detail.This translation project was listed as one of the Chinese Academic Translation Projects of the National Social Science Fund of China for 2020,which is of great significance in disseminating the Chinese scholars’ academic ideas to foreign scholars.The source text is an academic text with rigorous logic,repeated terms,and objective expressions,so it is suitable for machine translation.However,the machine-translated version cannot meet publication standards,so post-editing is essential.Google Translate is adopted to pre-translate the source text.Based on the analysis of machine translation output,the author discusses the machine translation errors at four levels,namely lexis,syntax,discourse,and formatting,and proposes corresponding post-editing methods.For the lexical errors,such as mistranslation of terms and mistranslation of Chinese four-character expressions,the author employs replacement and liberal translation to ensure the accuracy of meaning.At the syntactic level,to amend the mistranslated subjects and improper active sentences,the author makes the ambiguous subject overt and converts active voice to passive voice in order to produce clear and fluent expressions in English.As for the errors at the textual level,which include redundancy and lack of logic,the methods of deleting redundant expressions and introducing logical connectives are adopted.According to the translation style guide followed in this translation project,the format of punctuation and sub-headings is modified.The author hopes that this translation practice report can serve as a reference for the application of machine translation and post-editing in academic translation.Besides,it is hoped that this report will promote the academic exchanges between Chinese and foreign scholars.