Mistranslation in the English AI Translation of Classical Poetry: A Comparative Study of AI Translation and Yuanchong Xu’s Version of “A Moonlit Night On The Spring River”

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_83How to use a DOI?

Keywords

“A Moonlit Night On The Spring River”; AI Translation; Yuanchong Xu; Mistranslation in English Translation

Abstract

AI is widely used by virtue of its efficiency and convenience. However, when facing literary and emotional texts, its limitations are increasingly prominent. This paper systematically analyzes the mistranslation of AI translation of classical poetry by comparing Yuanchong Xu’s English translation of “A Moonlit Night On The Spring River” with Doubao’s and Gemini’s AI translation. The study found that there are systemic problems in AI translation, such as stiff translation, inappropriate semantic expression, cumbersome translation, and cultural image distortion. The root cause is that the prediction mechanism based on statistical probability of the large language model lacks a deep understanding of cultural context, historical background, and emotional intention, and it is difficult to achieve “emotional expression”. The research points out that AI performs well in low-level cognitive tasks, but it has obvious limitations in high-level cognitive fields such as cultural image reappearance and creative expression. It is suggested to build a human-computer cooperation path of “AI translation--AI data search--artificial beautification processing”, give full play to the advantages of AI efficiency and human translators’ cognitive advantages, and seek a balance between cultural communication and readers’ understanding, so as to realize the ideal of cross-cultural communication of classical poetry.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jun Wu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/04
TI  - Mistranslation in the English AI Translation of Classical Poetry: A Comparative Study of AI Translation and Yuanchong Xu’s Version of “A Moonlit Night On The Spring River”
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 3rd International Conference on Public Relations and Media Communication (PRMC 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 766
EP  - 774
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_83
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_83
ID  - Wu2026
ER  -