摘要
This studyaims to explore the impact of neural machine translation(NMT)postediting on metaphorical expressions from English to Chinese in terms of productivity,translation quality,and the strategies employed.To this end,a comparative study was carried out with 30 student translators who post-edited or translated a text rich in metaphors.By triangulating datafromkeystroke logging,retrospectiveprotocols,questionnaires,and translation quality evaluation,it was found that:(1)processing metaphorical expressions using NMT post-editing has significantly increased the translators'productivity compared to translating them from scratch;(2)NMT was perceived to be useful in processing metaphorical expressions and post-editing produced fewer errors in the final output than translation from scratch;(3)different strategies were used to process metaphorical expressions in post-editing and from-scratch translation due to the inherent differences in the two tasks,with "direct transfer"used most frequently in post-editing as translators usually rely on the NMT output to produce the final translation but more balanced strategies adopted in from-scratch translation as they need to seek for different solutions to rendering the metaphorical expressions;the quality of NMT output played a major role in what strategies were adopted to process the metaphorical expressions and their final product quality in post-editing,rather than the conventionality of the metaphorical expressions in the source text.Practical and research implications are discussed.
