A Study On The Framing Of Machine Translation By Chinese And U.S.Media

As Artificial Intelligence(AI)attracts increasing attention,Machine Translation(MT)as a key domain of AI has aroused a heated discussion in Chinese and U.S.media.There are some of the news reports with eye-catching but tendentious titles,causing panic about the replacement of human translators by Machine Translation.This qualitative research is designed to probe for a deeper understanding of MT by analyzing 31 English and 45 Chinese news reports about three MT-related topics,namely Machine Translation technology,Machine Translation business and Machine Translation and human translators.Under the guidance of Entman's Media Framing theory,frames of Machine Translation in Chinese and U.S.media and the framing processes through comparison between frames have been explored.The study concludes Chinese media frames that MT technology is progressive,MT business is booming yet confronted with challenges,and the machine-human relationship is adjusted from cut-throat competitors to mutual-beneficial partners.In the U.S.media frames,MT technology is still growing with difficulties,MT business is high-cost and high-return,and machine-human relationship has always been the partnership.Besides,the study also discovers the process of framing.Compared with U.S.media,Chinese media highlights technological progress of MT while it underplays challenges,highlights bottlenecks in MT business while it underplays high business return of MT,highlighted the competitive relations between human translators and MT while it underplayed the co-working relations between them.However,it treats the man-machine relationship more cautiously than before.The significance lies in the inspiration for translation majors that combining different frames with the framing process may help recognize and understand the true MT,choose how to face the new technology,and make career decisions more firmly.