A Study of Influences of Big Data on Machine Translation and Enlightenment for Translation Teaching in Cross-cultural Communication

Machine translation (MT) has been fiercely discussed and studied recently, especially neural machine translation (NMT). Most of the studies concentrated on MT working mechanism, translation systems, translation methodologies and chronological studies on the development of MT. However, there has been little work exploring the connection between big data and MT, or the influences of big data on MT. As the “Internet
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Era” comes, big data has so many influences on researches, work, studies, daily life etc. This paper examines how and from which aspects big data will affect MT, which shows that the following perspectives will be influenced: linguistic habit, translation of newly-born words, update rules of languages, English for special purpose (ESP), discourse systems with Chinese characteristics, hardware and software of computers, translation systems and storage ability, MT teaching, etc. With the research findings, this paper also proposes enlightenments for translation teaching so as to provide more qualified personnel to meet the demand of the market in cross-cultural communication.