Modern Social Science Research

Legal translation is helpful to create favorable legal conditions and a good external environment for China’s modernization, while the translation of local regulations is an important vehicle for showcasing the achievements of regional legal system construction and promoting international legal exchanges. The increasing number of local regulations poses a serious challenge to human translation. As legal texts are characterized by their highly formalized expressions and rigorous terminology, they are highly suitable for machine translation to enhance translation efficiency. Post-editing (PE) is a key to their translation quality. The legal texts with regional characteristics are selected from the Guangdong Provincial Regulations and Rules Normative Database, and machine-translated to establish a bilingual database and terminology. Then human analysis of translation failures is conducted to explore post-editing strategies for legal texts based on artificial intelligence technology to address problems in machine translation concerning terminology accuracy, sentence structure, and cultural adaptability. Through case analysis, the study summarizes strategies such as using AI search, translation comparison functions, and literal translation with annotations to achieve accurate terminology translation. In terms of sentence structure, AI prompts are used to help translators to better understand the original text, analyze sentence structure, and provide multiple translation options, followed by strategies such as sentence order adjustment and synonym substitution to improve translation quality.

AI technology; Legal translation; Post-editing strategies; Local regulations