A Study of Pre-editing Methods at the Lexical Level in the Process of Machine Translation

Abstract

As the demand for translation increases, the role of machine translation in improving the efficiency of translation is increasingly prominent, but due to its inherent limitations, the translation quality of machine translation is not guaranteed. Pre-editing is one of the ways to enhance the quality of machine translated texts. With Google online translation as a tool, the effect of pre-editing on the quality of machine translation is studied by adopting the Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) approach. The pre-editing methods of additions, omissions, replacing and terminology preprocessing based on the lexical level are proposed. The results show these methods can play a role in improving the quality of English-to-Chinese machine translations. In most cases, pre-editing at the lexical level is sufficient to generate high-quality machine translation output, but the effectiveness of pre-editing can be further improved when perspective-shifting is involved or when the target language involves contextually consistent verb or person usage.