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Article published In:
Literary Translation in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Its Future Prospects
Edited by Wang Ning and Wang Hongtao
[Babel 69:4] 2023
► pp. 546–563

The creativity and limitations of AI neural machine translation

A corpus-based study of DeepL’s English-to-Chinese translation of Shakespeare’s plays

| Shanghai International Studies University
| Shanghai International Studies University
This study examines the performance of the neural machine translation system DeepL in translating Shakespeare’s plays Coriolanus and The Merchant of Venice. The aim here is to explore the strengths and limitations of an AI-based English-Chinese translation of literary texts. Adopting a corpus-based approach, the study investigates the accuracy and fluency rates, the linguistic features, and the use of various methods of translation in the Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s plays conducted via DeepL. It compares these to the translations by Liang Shiqiu, a well-known Chinese translator. The study finds that DeepL performs well in translating these works, with an accuracy and fluency rate of above 80% in sampled texts, showing the potential of the use of neural machine translation in translating literary texts across distant languages. Our research further reveals that the DeepL translations exhibit a certain degree of creativity in their use of translation methods such as addition, explicitation, conversion and shift of perspective, and in the use of Chinese sentence-final modal particles, as well as Chinese modal verbs. On the other hand, the system appears to be limited in that a certain amount of translation errors are present, including literal translations.
Keywords: AI, translation, corpus, limitations, Chinese, Shakespeare, neural machine translation, DeepL
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.MT in the translation of literary texts
  • 3.Research design
    • 3.1The corpus for the research
    • 3.2Research procedures
    • 3.3Theoretical framework
      • 3.3.1Sentence-final modal particles
      • 3.3.2Modal verbs
      • 3.3.3Translation methods
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Errors in the Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s Plays by DeepL
    • 4.2Linguistic features of the Chinese translations by DeepL
      • 4.2.1The use of Chinese sentence-final modal particles
      • 4.2.2The use of Chinese modal verbs
    • 4.3The use of translation methods in the translations by DeepL
      • 4.3.1Explicitation
      • 4.3.2Conversion
      • 4.3.3Shift of perspective
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 24 July 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00331.hu
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