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Translation and Foreign Language Learning

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ArticleTranslation Theories and Skills http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2026.01.003

A Corpus-based Comparative Study of Human Translation and Machine Translation from the Perspective of “Political Equivalence”

Siyi Shen

School of Interpreting and Translation Studies, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou 510420, Guangdong, China.

*Corresponding author: Siyi Shen

Published: January 31, 2026

Abstract

Political documents pertain to important national policies, and the English translation of Chinese political texts is a crucial means of constructing an international political discourse system and enhancing the country’s image. Therefore, the translation of political documents should focus on “Political Equivalence.” This study uses the 2025 Report on the Work of the Government to build corpora, aiming to compare and analyze the differences in textual characteristics between human translations, ChatGPT translations, and DeepL translations and to evaluate the effectiveness of machine translation in the translation of political texts. The results indicate that both ChatGPT and DeepL translations struggle to achieve Political Equivalence. However, ChatGPT shows certain advantages over traditional machine translations, yet it still has limitations in handling complex structures and culture-loaded words. These findings reveal the limitations and advantages of machine translation. Finally, this study explores the trends in translation development in the era of artificial intelligence, hoping to provide insights for translation teaching in the new era.

Keyword

ChatGPT; Political Equivalence; Machine translation

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Copyright

© 2026 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

A Corpus-based Comparative Study of Human Translation and Machine Translation from the Perspective of “Political Equivalence”

How to cite this paper: Siyi Shen. (2026). A Corpus-based Comparative Study of Human Translation and Machine Translation from the Perspective of “Political Equivalence”. Translation and Foreign Language Learning2(1), 14-20.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2026.01.003