Modern Social Science Research

With the support of artificial intelligence, the more powerful and more favored machine translation has become the indispensable tool for translators. But does it mean that the AI-empowered machine translation can independently and perfectly undertake all translation projects? This paper probes into this issue by experimenting with ChatGPT-4o, Tongyi Qianwen, and other well-known software to discover and prove the performance of AI-empowered machine translation. The findings reveal that from the perspective of cross-level translation from English long sentence into Chinese paragraph (S-to-P) and Chinese paragraph into English long sentence (P-to-S), the latter seems better. But since Chinese is paratactic language system and English is hypotactic language system, translation between Chinese and English means transformation between these two features. Our experiment proves the big defect in the transformation, whether from E to C or C to E. So, human translator’s intervention is required for desired effect with macro syntactical reconstruction and reorganization if necessary.

Artificial intelligence; Machine translation; Sentence-paragraph cross level; Structural reconstruction