This study explores the effectiveness of training the reduction technique in undergraduate English-to-Chinese translation through a translation exercise of the Les Misérables musical lyrics. The design consists of an exercise part and a test part. In the exercise segment, the researcher guided the students through a two-stage translation practice. They first produced a prosaic translation, and then revised it into a singable version to align with the music. For assessment, nine common reduction categories were enlisted for analysis. A statistical computation was conducted to check whether the singable version exhibited a significant textual decrease against the prosaic version. A close reading was performed on the translated texts to analyze and calculate the reduced part in terms of the nine categories. In the test segment, the researcher designed a prosaic text for rendition in the pretest and posttest. A statistical analysis was undertaken to inspect whether the word count in the posttest was significantly lower than that in the pretest. The reduced part was scrutinized and computed based on the nine categories. Comparing the performance between exercise and test revealed whether the students applied their acquired technique in prosaic translation. The results are: the translation exercise of the Les Misérables lyrics assists the students in further developing their reduction skill; under the constraints of the music the three most frequently applied categories of reduction are Idiom and Phrase, Personal Pronoun, and Conjunction; and the reduction technique acquired in the song lyrics translation practice is successfully applied to a prose translation.
