A Comparative Study of Translation Quality between Machine Translation Text and Human Translation from the Perspective of Discourse Cohesion Theory—Taking Fond Memories of Peiping as an Example

As the political, economic, and cultural intertwining between countries reaches an unprecedented level of closeness, cooperation in various other fields is also deepening, which implies a significant demand for translation. The rapid development of artificial intelligence has also driven the prosperity of machine translation. Machine translation, with its speed and low cost, has quickly gained popularity in the translation market, becoming an important aid in translation tasks. Machine translation can process large volumes of text in a very short time, saving much time and human resources for translation tasks, but it is not 100% accurate, and the translations produced by machines often require subsequent human proofreading. This article aims to compare machine translation and human translation from the perspective of discourse coherence, using Mr. Lao She's work Fond Memories of Peiping as a case study to highlight the differences in discourse coherence between the two translations, identify the issues in machine translation, and improve the quality of machine translation in order to more efficiently promote the development of translation.