REPORT ON POST-EDITING OF ABSTRACT OF AEROSPACE ARTICLES UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF FUNCTIONAL EQUIVALENCE THEORY

Abstract

Background: According to the Language Service Development in China: 2020, Machine Translation(MT) is increasingly used in the language services industry. To analyze the problems of MT and find solutions, the author post-edited ten abstracts of aerospace papers from CNKI core journals by Google translate. Principal Findings: The fact is that MT is restricted to the original text features and confined to formal correspondence, failing to recognize the differences between English and Chinese, resulting in errors at all levels: lexical, syntactic, and contextual, which greatly affects the textual quality. Therefore, it is quite necessary to conduct post-editing to correct the mistakes. In order to make the MT version accurate and readable, the author conducts the post-editing under the guidance of Functional Equivalence Theory and summarizes PE techniques. For lexical errors, especially for terminology errors, the author must figure out word meanings by checking the authoritative references. At the sentence level, the author needs to change the word order according to the meaning so as to achieve semantic equivalence. At the discourse level, the author must pay attention to the coherence and make the logical relationship clear to reproduce the contextual meaning of the original texts. Conclusions: The results of the paper show that post-editing under the guidance of the Functional Equivalence Theory can correct MT errors, increase translation accuracy, and provide references for post-editing of MT.