Consideration for Effective Use of Japanese-English Machine Translation:

Application of an English Writing Strategy

Abstract

To use machine translation effectively, it is necessary to do advance-editing which makes an original text easier to translate into the target language. Also, it is necessary for users of machine translation to know the target language grammar to do advance-editing. In this research, to get suggestions for better use of machine translation, two Japanese university students were the research participants: “A” in the course for elementary school education and “B” in English Education. Participants of this research wrote one e-mail passage as they usually do, and one in being conscience of making it easier to translate into English. Both e-mails were written in Japanese. After that, these e-mail passages were translated into English by machine translation. The author analyzed the complexity of the output sentences, focusing on whether the meaning of these sentences was understandable. As a result, “A” produced appropriate sentences for machine translation. On the other hand, “B” produced many complex sentences, and there were errors that make them hard to understand the meaning. In addition, the author applied the rules of machine translation being suggested in the previous research to the error sentences and proposed the application of a writing strategy to advance-editing of machine translation.