Modern Social Science Research

This study takes the Functional Equivalence Theory as its framework, comparing different AI translations of A Tale of Two Cities with Song Zhaolin’s version to explore the differences in their achievement of functional equivalence. The results show that AI translations exhibit high accuracy in most cases of lexical and syntactic equivalence; however, in the translation of vocabulary in specific cultural contexts and textual translation, due to the failure to integrate cultural connotations and contextual logic, the vocabulary lacks contextual adaptability, the expression is rigid, and it is difficult to achieve the ideal literary effect. Based on this, it is suggested that AI translation needs to strengthen the construction of cultural corpora and contextual algorithms, and the model combining AI preliminary translation with human proofreading can be adopted in literary translation to balance efficiency and quality.

Functional equivalence theory; AI translation; A Tale of Two Cities