A Contrastive Study on Linguistic Features between HT and MT based on NLPIR-ICTCLAS: A Case Study of Philosophical Text

Abstract

This paper, with the aid of NLPIR-ICTCLAS, analyzes and compares original English texts and different translation versions of a philosophical text. A 1:6 English-Chinese translation corpus is applied to study the linguistic structural features of human translation (HT) and machine translation (MT). This study shows that the HT is characterized by more complicated language and complex sentences. At the same time, in the process of translation, compared with MT engines, human translator can intentionally avoid using too many functional words, and deliver grammatical structures and logical relations of sentences mainly by the meanings of words or clauses. The five MT versions share similarities in the use of notional words and functional words.