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Machine Translation - A challenge or a chance for human translators?

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To the To Do list 13 陈湘琼Chen Xiangqiong（Study on Post-editing from the Perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory ）

Abstract

With the development of technology，machine translation methods are changing. From rule-based methods to corpus-based methods，and then to neural network translation，every time machine translation become more precise, which means it is not impossible the complete replacement of human translation by machine translation. But machine translation still faces many problems until today such as : fail to translate special terms, incapable to set the right sentence order, unable to understand content and culture background etc. All of these need to be checked out and modified by human translator, so it can be predict that the model Human + Machine will last for a long period. This article will discuss mistakes made in machine translation and describe what translators should do in post-editing based on the skopos theory and functional equivalence theory

Key words

machine translation，post-editing，skopos theory，functional equivalence theory

题目

基于功能对等视角探讨译后编辑问题与对策

摘要

随着科技的不断发展，机器翻译方法也在不断变革，从基于规则的机器翻译，到基于统计的机器翻译，再到今天基于人工神经网络的机器翻译，每一次变化都让机器翻译变得更精确，更高质。这意味着在不远的将来，机器翻译完全代替人工翻译成为一种可能。但是直至今天，机器翻译仍然面临许多的问题如：无法准确翻译术语、无法正确排列句子语序、无法分辨语境等，这些问题依然需要人工检查和修改。机器翻译自有其优点，人工翻译也有无可替代之处，所以在很长一段时间内，翻译都应该是机器+人工的运作方式。本文将基于翻译目的论和功能对等理论，对机器翻译可能出现的错误之处进行探讨，并且旨在描述译者在进行译后编辑时需要注重的方面，为广大译员提供参考。

关键词

机器翻译，译后编辑，翻译目的论，功能对等

1. Introduction

For a long time, researchers believe MT may have seemed relatively peripheral, with limited use. But recently, because of the technological advances in the field of machine translation, the translation industry has been experiencing a great revolution where the speed and amount of translation has been raised desperately. So, the idea that human translation may be completely replaced by machine translation in the future may come true. This changing landscape of the translation industry raises questions to translators. On the one hand, they earnestly want to identify their own role in translation field and confront a serious problem that they may lost job in the future. On the other hand, in more professional contexts, machine translation still can’t overcome difficulties such as: fail to translate special terms, incapable to set the right sentence order, unable to understand content and culture background etc. For this reason, human-machine interaction is certainly becoming a trend in the recent future. Therefore, translators start to use machine translations as raw versions to be further post-edited, which becomes the topic we want to discuss today. This paper presents a research investigating the post-editing work in machine translation. From the prospect of functional equivalence and skopos theory, we discuss the errors machine translation may made in the process and what strategies translator should use when translating. Section 2 provides an overview of the two theories and the development in the practical use. Section 3 presents debates on relationship between MT and HT. Section 4 review the history and development of post-editing.

2. Functional Equivalence and Skopos Theory

Functional equivalence theory is the core of Eugene Nida’s translation theory, who is a famous translator and researcher in America. It aims to set a general standard for evaluating the quality of translation. In his theory Nida points out that “translation is to convey the information from source language to target language with the most proper and natural language.”(Guo Jianzhong, 2000:65) He holds that translator should not only achieve the information equivalence in lexical sense but also take into account the cultural background of the target language and achieve the equivalence in semantics, style and literature form. So the dynamic equivalence contains four aspects: 1. lexical equivalence；2.syntactic equivalence；3.textual equivalence；4.stylistic equivalence, which basically construct and guide the idea of this article.

In 1978, Hans Vermeer put forward skopos theory in his book Framework for a General Translation Theory. In this theory, he believes that translation is a human activity which means it has special purpose in itself like other human activities.(Nord, 2001:12) Also, there are some rules that the translator should follow in the progress of translation: 1.purpose principle; 2.intra-textual coherence; 3.fidelity rule, which exactly shows its correlation with machine translation.

According to these two theories, we can start now to explore some principles and standard that translator ought to obey in post-editing. Firstly, efficiency and accuracy are really important because the translator’s purpose is obviously raising money in comparatively short time. If they fail to provide translation with high quality or if they unable to finish the job before deadline, the consequence will be relatively bad. Secondly, translators need to achieve equivalence in lexical level, syntactic level, textual level and stylistic level in post-editing for the reason that machine translation can be always misunderstood when they are dealing with words and sentences with special background knowledge. Thirdly, it is almost impossible for machine translation to achieve communicative goal and fulfil cultural exchange that human brain is indispensable to jump over the gap. And more details will be discussed later on.

3. Machine Translation Versus Human Translation

The dream that natural language can be translated by machine come true in the late twentieth. Though not completely perfect, machine translation still fulfil the requirement of translation in technical manuals, scientific documents, commercial prospectuses, administrative memoranda and medical reports.(W.John Hutchins, 1995:431)

Researchers divide traditional machine translation method into three categories:Rule-Based, Corpus-Based and Hybrid methods, and all of them have their own merits and demerits. The first one builds the translation knowledge base on dictionaries and grammar rules, but it is not so practical for languages without much correlation and highly rely on human experience. The second one builds the translation knowledge by making full use of the corpus, which is still the mainstream of today’s machine translation. The last one mix both of rule and corpus and successfully raise the efficiency of translation, but it is tough to be managed because of complex system and weak extend ability. (Hou Qiang, 2019:30)

According to Martin Woesle, the advantages and disadvantages of machine translation can be obvious. For advantages, machine translation has its speed and availability, low costs, efficiency and welcome of cooperation. However, it can not satisfy some special situation such as: noisy background, ill connectivity, short of electricity, corpus limitation and cultural sensitivity. (Martin Woesle, 2021:203)

4. Post-editing

For a long time, researchers believe MT may have seemed relatively peripheral, with limited use. But recently, because of the technological advances in the field of machine translation, the translation industry has been experiencing a great revolution where the speed and amount of translation has been raised desperately. So, the idea that human translation may be completely replaced by machine translation in the future may come true. This changing landscape of the translation industry raises questions to translators. On the one hand, they earnestly want to identify their own role in translation field and confront a serious problem that they may lost job in the future. On the other hand, in more professional contexts, machine translation still can’t overcome difficulties such as: fail to translate special terms, incapable to set the right sentence order, unable to understand content and culture background etc. For this reason, human-machine interaction is certainly becoming a trend in the recent future. Therefore, translators start to use machine translations as raw versions to be further post-edited, which becomes the topic we want to discuss today. This paper presents a research investigating the post-editing work in machine translation. From the prospect of functional equivalence and skopos theory, we discuss the errors machine translation may made in the process and what strategies translator should use when translating. Section 2 provides an overview of the two theories and the development in the practical use. Section 3 presents debates on relationship between MT and HT. Section 4 review the history and development of post-editing.

5. Word Errors

According to …, post-editing machine translation can increase the productivity of translators in terms of speed, while retaining or in some cases even improving the quality of their translations. However, such benefits are not always guaranteed except in the right condition.[2] Since the purpose of the translator is efficiency and accuracy, they have to evaluate what are right texts and what are worth to be post-edited.

Conclusion

It is very important to mention that the translator’s experience is not always being taken into account, and obviously novice translators are quite different from those professional translators. In this paper, we discuss the problems in a very general situation from the point view of machine translation errors for professional translators as well as student translator.