Translating English Phrasal Verbs into Mandarin: A Comparative Study of Different Commercial Machine Translation Engines

This thesis explores the effectiveness of three different machine translation (MT) engines—Google Translate, ChatGPT, and Baidu—in translating English phrasal verbs into Mandarin. The study focuses on three categories of phrasal verbs: literal, aspectual, and idiomatic. A corpus of sentences containing various phrasal verbs was translated by each MT engine and evaluated for general translation quality using automatic metrics and for the accuracy of phrasal verb translations via human assessment. Results indicate that while improvements have been made in MT, significant challenges remain, particularly with literal phrasal verbs. Among the MT engines, Baidu performed the best, likely due to its extensive training on Mandarin data. However, ChatGPT shows promise, proposing that with advanced prompting and fine-tuning, it could surpass Baidu. This research highlights the current strengths and weaknesses of MT engines in handling phrasal verbs and suggests directions for future...Show moreThis thesis explores the effectiveness of three different machine translation (MT) engines—Google Translate, ChatGPT, and Baidu—in translating English phrasal verbs into Mandarin. The study focuses on three categories of phrasal verbs: literal, aspectual, and idiomatic. A corpus of sentences containing various phrasal verbs was translated by each MT engine and evaluated for general translation quality using automatic metrics and for the accuracy of phrasal verb translations via human assessment. Results indicate that while improvements have been made in MT, significant challenges remain, particularly with literal phrasal verbs. Among the MT engines, Baidu performed the best, likely due to its extensive training on Mandarin data. However, ChatGPT shows promise, proposing that with advanced prompting and fine-tuning, it could surpass Baidu. This research highlights the current strengths and weaknesses of MT engines in handling phrasal verbs and suggests directions for future improvements in MT technology.Show less

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Translating English Phrasal Verbs into Mandarin: A Comparative Study of Different Commercial Machine Translation Engines