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Translation and Foreign Language Learning

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ArticleInterdisciplinary Studies of Translation http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.08.021

Postcolonial Tendencies in AI Translation

Wenhao Dong

Gannan Normal University School of Foreign Languages, Ganzhou 314000, Jiangxi, China.

*Corresponding author: Wenhao Dong

Published: September 26, 2025

Article history: Updated on June 11, 2026

Abstract

The present research work is on English versions of the novel Border Town by Shen Congwen where both the machine translation by ChatGPT-4o and human translation by Yang Xianyi are compared to determine possible postcolonial inclinations of AI translation. We developed a colonial expressions vocabulary list, statistically classified it and evaluated translation examples. Even though the total percentages of postcolonial expressions remain the same in both ChatGPT-4o and Yang translation, further examination will reveal that ChatGPT-4o has greater values of postcolonial expressions in different categories such as folklore, historical culture, and institutions among others. It can be seen as an inclination towards weakening local culture and adapting to the mainstream Western context, which is a sign of cultural hegemony. The overall postcolonial expression rate is lower in Yang translation and more of local culture is preserved. Also, ChatGPT-4o has much larger shares of strong postcolonial expressions compared to human translation, which indicates more prominent cultural adaptation and local weakening tendencies. It suggests AI translation is likely to be biased towards Western contexts, indicating the presence of postcolonial tendencies. The paper reveals how AI translation may cause cultural hegemony threats and demands that the development of technologies should be balanced with cultural pluralism and translation morality.

Keyword

AI translation; ChatGPT-4o; Postcolonialism; Border Town; Translation compar-ison

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Copyright

© 2025 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

How to cite this paper

Postcolonial Tendencies in AI Translation

How to cite this paper: Wenhao Dong. (2025). Postcolonial Tendencies in AI Translation. Translation and Foreign Language Learning1(1), 130-137.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.08.021