Abstract: Based on sentence-level comparative study of machine translation output and human translation from Automobile Technical Document Translation Corpus, this paper reveals the statistic result of the translation errors of technical terms in machine translation output, and explains the three typical forms of errors in misidentifying the syntactical functions of technical terms serving as noun, verb or adjective, mistranslating abbreviations of technical terms and lacking consistency in the translation of technical terms. The research is useful to improve the translation system by narrowing down the usages of technical terms in the restricted area of automobile technical documents.

Key words: machine translation output, human translation, restricted language, technical terms