Adaptation Level Evaluation of Two Free Online Machine Translators Youdao and Google in Translating Chinese City Publicity Materials

Globalization and the opening up lead to an increasing demand for the translation of publicity materials to let the world know more about China. This paper aims to probe the Chinese-English translation of city publicity materials from the perspective of Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory by using two online translators of Youdao and Google. Translation is a process of transforming information in one language into another one. English and Chinese belong to different families with different characteristics in words meaning, syntax structure and cultural background. The study aims to see whether these two online translators can make flexible and necessary adaptations to gap the differences between these two languages. The findings of this study imply that these machine applications can be implemented to perform Chinese into English translation to get the broad gist of a source text, but could not make most of the necessary and sufficient adaptations on linguistic and non-linguistic levels, so deep and thorough post-editing process is essential. The study recommends that more studies are encouraged to continue to assess the quality of machine translation, with the maim of further highlighting its weaknesses and finding out the strategies that should be adopted to overcome them.