Modern Social Science Research

This study extracted two consecutive sections, “Grandma’s World” and “Grandma’s Funeral,” from the essay collection Distant Sunflower Fields. These texts were translated using seven large language models (Kimi, Deepseek 3.2, Gemini 3.0 Flash, Qwen-3.5 Plus, Qwen-3 Max, GPT 5.4, and ERNIE Bot). Various translation evaluation metrics (TTR, BLEU, METEOR) were employed to evaluate and compare each translation with the published human translation. Additionally, the House’s Scale and MQM Scale were utilized to evaluate the accuracy and literariness of the translations. The results indicate that Large Language Models (LLMs) have displayed robust capabilities in literary translation, with Kimi and Deepseek 3.2 notably distinguishing themselves in multi-dimensional assessments. Nevertheless, other peer models continue to face challenges in interpreting culture-specific nuances and mastering stylistic literary expression, highlighting a considerable gap that necessitates further optimization.

Large language models; Distant Sunflower Fields; Translation quality; Assessment; Comparison