The Translation Quality Assessment of Google Translate’s Toward A More Critical Approach To Bio-events

Abstract

There are few Chinese translation resources in paleontology, and literature reading relies heavily on machine translation, yet the translation quality cannot be guaranteed. Taking Towards a More Critical Approach toward Bio-events as a sample, this study aims to discuss the effectiveness of Google Translate in English-to-Chinese translation of paleontology literature. By comparing the translated text by Google Translate with that in Selected Papers of Theoretical Paleontology, the study assesses the translation from the perspectives of accuracy in word, sentence usage, meaning expression, logical accuracy, and readability. The assessment results show that the English-to-Chinese translation by Google Translate can accurately translate the deductive reasoning logic of the original text, and its coherence is basically consistent with the original text. However, there are paucity such as inaccurate word usage and deviations in sentence structure, leading to poor readability in some passages. This study provides insights into the use of machine translation strategies for paleontology researchers.