The Combined Effect of Grammatical Proficiency and Machine Translation Assistance on Translation Accuracy: A Quantitative Study

This quantitative study examined the combined effect of student translators’ grammatical proficiency and machine translation assistance on the accuracy of Chinese-to-Japanese (CN-JP) news translation. This study employed the paired samples t-test and the ordinary least squares regression to analyse the data. The results demonstrated that the use of an MT tool significantly improved the accuracy of CN-JP news translation. Both grammatical proficiency and the use of MT had a significant effect on translation quality improvement. However, a solid level of grammatical proficiency was found to be more critical than the use of machine translation for producing high-quality translations. The findings have significant implications for translation education and may inspire translation educators to incorporate MT tools into educational settings while strengthening students’ grammatical competence.