Artificial intelligence-powered evaluation model for English translation education in university: combining quantitative and qualitative methods

Assessing students’ learning outcomes and abilities has always been a key link for English translation education in universities. However, traditional evaluation methods often face problems such as strong subjectivity and long time consumption, and it is difficult to meet the needs of large-scale classroom environments. To address these issues, this paper proposes and verifies a translation teaching quality evaluation model based on artificial intelligence (AI), aiming to improve the objectivity, consistency and efficiency of the evaluation. A mixed-methods design with data triangulation is employed to analyze data through a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The quantitative part collects assessment feedback data from 796 English-related majors through questionnaire surveys, and the qualitative part uses focus group discussions to deeply analyze students’ acceptance and trust in the AI evaluation system and the impact of AI evaluation on the development of translation ability. The results show that the AI evaluation model contributes to improving the consistency of evaluation results and the pertinence of feedback, and students have a high overall trust in AI evaluation. Nevertheless, some students questioned the limitations of AI in the cultural context and creativity evaluation. Based on the research findings, this paper further proposes practical suggestions for combining AI evaluation with traditional teacher evaluation in translation education, emphasizing the synergy between teachers and AI technology to achieve comprehensive optimization of translation teaching evaluation.