What Can We Learn from the 21st Century Translator Pen? A Case Analysis on Comparing English-to-Chinese Rendition Differences between Human and Machine Translation

This study investigated and compared differences in rendering from the same English source text into two versions of target text in Chinese produced respectively by human and machine translator represented by translator pen. Using news report as case analysis, this study found that improper segmentation of punctuation marks appeared most frequently in machine translation, followed by lexical vacancy, and by inconsistency of terms. This study also identified rendition differences between human and machine translation in the handling of terms as well as in the treatment of punctuation marks. Overall, the human translator showed more flexibility in the selection of words to match target text expression than the machine translator.