Automated and Human Interaction in Written Discourse: A Contrastive Parallel Corpus-based Investigation of Metadiscourse Features in Machine-Human Translations

Muhammad Afzaal, Muhammad Imran, Xiangtao Du and Norah Almusharraf

SAGE Open, 2022, vol. 12, issue 4, 21582440221142210

Abstract: The rise of the internet has generated a need for fast online translations, which human translators cannot meet. Statistical tools such as Google and Baidu Translate provide automatic translation from one written language to another. This study reports the descriptive comparison of the machine-translation (MT) with human translation (HT), considering the metadiscoursal interactional features. The study uses a parallel corpus consisting of 79 texts translated from Chinese to English by professional human translators and machine translations (Baidu translate & Google translate) and a comparable reference corpus of non-translated English text. The statistical analysis revealed no statistically significant difference between Baidu and Google translate regarding all types of metadiscoursal indicators. However, the findings of this study demonstrate significant disparities in the interactional characteristics of various HT and MT groups. Compared to the metadiscourse features in non-translated English political texts, human translators were found to outperform machine translations in the use of attitude markers. In contrast, the distribution of directives in machine-translated texts is more native-like. In addition, MT and HT have utilized a significantly smaller number of hedges, self-mention, and readers than non-translated texts. Our results indicate that the MT systems, though still calling for further improvement, have shown tremendous growth potential and may complement human translators.

Keywords: machine translation; human translation; interactive features; translation procedure; corpora (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440221142210 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:12:y:2022:i:4:p:21582440221142210

DOI: 10.1177/21582440221142210

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().