The literature on machine translation post-editing has mostly been concentrated on editing machine translations of technical texts such as user manuals or technical specifications. Texts that are rich with metaphorical expressions have been regarded as not suitable for machine translation post-editing. However, the improvements of machine translation and the growth of the post-editing market have gradually been expanding the machine translation applicable text scope from technical texts to newspapers although newspaper texts are characterized by a relatively high percentage(approximately 15%) of metaphors. A previous research suggests that post editing machine translation of newspaper texts requires less cognitive efforts than translating from scratch; therefore, machine translation post-editing of newspaper texts is efficient and worth carrying out.
For systematic research about metaphors, Newmark(1988) distinguished six types of metaphors: dead, cliché, stock, adapted, recent and original. Metaphors frequently observed in newspapers are dead, cliché, and stock metaphors. For these metaphors, seven strategies of translating metaphorical expressions have been suggested(Newmark 1981): reproducing, replacing, simile, simile+sense, converting to sense, deleting, and combing the same metaphor with the sense. Among these strategies, reproducing strategy is quite acceptable for dead and cliché metaphors, which can be quickly processed by machine. For stock metaphors, faithful reproduction of the relatively new concept of the metaphor is too foreign for target readers to accept without any resistance. In this case, the most applicable strategy for machine translation post-editing turns out to be ‘combing the same metaphor with the sense’. It is substantiated by survey results and actually translated metaphor in local newspapers.