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Translation and Foreign Language Learning

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ArticleTranslation Theories and Skills http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.12.002

A Corpus-based Comparative Study on English Translation Differences of Agricultural Journal Abstracts Between DeepSeek and Human Translation

Longxi Wei, Qihao Xu*

College of Foreign Languages, Shandong Agricultural University, Tai'an 271000, Shandong, China.

*Corresponding author: Qihao Xu

This work was supported by the Foreign Language Teaching Materials Research Project of the Institute for Language Materials Development, Shanghai International Studies University (Research on the Integration Mechanism of Excellent Chinese Traditional Culture in English Textbooks for Agricultural Universities from the Perspective of Legitimation Code Theory) [Grant No. 202412344SD].
Published: December 31, 2025

Abstract

Based on a self-built Chinese-English parallel corpus of agricultural journal abstracts, this study adopts a corpus-based translation studies approach and relevant tools to systematically compare human translation and DeepSeek in English translation from multiple dimensions. Results show that at the lexical level, human translation exhibits higher lexical richness and flexibility, while DeepSeek presents higher lexical density yet lower lexical variation and a preference for formal vocabulary. Syntactically, human translation uses concise structures and more passive voice, conforming better to English academic conventions, whereas DeepSeek tends to adopt longer sentences and fewer passive voice. In translation strategies, DeepSeek demonstrates a prominent explicitation tendency and out-performs literal human translation in standardizing agricultural terms. This study identifies the complementary characteristics of human and AI translation in agriculture and proposes an optimized human-machine collaboration mode “AI standardized draft translation + human academic polishing”, which offers practical implications for enhancing the overall quality and efficiency of academic translation.

Keyword

Corpus-based Translation Studies; Large Language Models; Agricultural Academ-ic Texts; Comparative Analysis; Human-Machine Collaboration

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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.
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How to cite this paper

A Corpus-based Comparative Study on English Translation Differences of Agricultural Journal Abstracts Between DeepSeek and Human Translation

How to cite this paper: Longxi Wei, Qihao Xu. (2025). A Corpus-based Comparative Study on English Translation Differences of Agricultural Journal Abstracts Between DeepSeek and Human Translation. Translation and Foreign Language Learning1(5), 761-766.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.12.002