Current Tendencies in Translation Studies from Machine Translation Perspective: A Case Study on Spanish-Chinese
Download PDF
$currentUrl="http://$_SERVER[HTTP_HOST]$_SERVER[REQUEST_URI]"

Keywords

Machine translation
AI in translation
Current studies
Spanish-Chinese

DOI

10.26689/ssr.v7i7.11607

Submitted : 2025-07-15
Accepted : 2025-07-30
Published : 2025-08-14

Abstract

The landscape of translation studies has been profoundly reshaped by the continued development of machine translation (MT), which is frequently associated with artificial intelligence (AI) contemporarily. While studies with specific topics related to MT keep emerging, it would be interesting and beneficial to have a panoramic view of current investigations in translation studies from a machine translation perspective, with language pairs perhaps not that common, such as Spanish-Chinese. In this paper, with VOSviewer, the authors intend to provide a bibliometric analysis of the published articles available online related to translation studies from the angle of machine translation with the language combination Spanish-Chinese. Moreover, a quantitative and qualitative analysis will be conducted on the same group of papers subject to bibliometric analysis, to have an overall understanding of the research topics, methods applied, texts used, and the findings achieved.

References

Kenny D, 2022, Introduction, in Machine Translation for Everyone: Empowering Users in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Language Science Press, Berlin, v–viii.

Kenny D, 2022, Human and Machine Translation, in Machine Translation for Everyone: Empowering Users in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Language Science Press, Berlin, 23–49.

Banchs RE, 2006, CHISPA-MT: A Consortium for the Development of Machine Translation Systems between the Chinese and Spanish Languages. Natural Language Processing, 2006(37): 347–348.

Banchs RE, Crego JM, Lambert P, et al., 2006, A Feasibility Study for Chinese-Spanish Statistical Machine Translation. Paper Presented at the Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP), 681–692. https://www.rbanchs.com/documents/2006_ISCSLP.pdf

Centelles J, Ruiz Costa-Jussa M, Banchs Martinez RE, 2014, A Client Mobile Application for Chinese-Spanish Statistical Machine Translation. Paper Presented at the INTERSPEECH 2014, 15th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Singapore, September 14–18, 2014, 1492–1493. https://upcommons.upc.edu/handle/2117/102407

Costa-Jussa MR, Henriquez CA, Banchs RE, 2012, Evaluating Indirect Strategies for Chinese-Spanish Statistical Machine Translation. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2012(45): 761–780. https://doi.org/10.1613/jair.3786

Costa-Jussa MR, Henriquez C, Banchs RE, 2011, Evaluation of Strategies for Statistical Machine Translation from Chinese to Spanish using English as a Pivot Language. Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, 2011(47): 119–126.

Gamboa Hernandez ML, 2019, Translation Technologies used by Advanced Mandarin Chinese Translation Students, thesis, Universidad Ricardo Palma.

Garces CV, Hu L, 2024, Machine Translation and Legal Text: A Case Study around Terminology (Spanish-Chinese). Journal of Translation Studies, 4(1): 95–113. https://doi.org/10.3726/JTS012024.05

Han J, 2017, Phrase Table Expansion for Statistical Machine Translation with Reduced Parallel Corpora: the Chinese-Spanish Case, thesis, Universitat Pampeu Fabra.

Lai H, 2023, Analysis of Neural Machine Translation Error Characteristics and their Post-editing: A Study of (Spanish-to-Chinese) Journalistic Article Translations, thesis, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

Lin M, 2023, Comparison and Analysis of Translation Quality in Baidu Translator, Youdao Translator and DeepL: The Case of “Global Health Sector Strategies on HIV, Viral Hepatitis and Sexually Transmitted Infections for the Period 2022–2030”, thesis, Universidad de Alcalá.

Liu S, 2023, Study on the Evaluation of Neural Machine Translation in the Legal Domain (Spanish-Chinese), thesis, Universidad de Alcalá.

Liu T, 2022, Machine Translation in Chinese-owned Businesses in Catalonia: A Tool for Breaking Language Barriers, thesis, Universitat Pampeu Fabra.

Paez Merida M, 2019, Machine Translation on the Internet: Google Translate and Baidu Translate, thesis, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

Pietrzak J, Garcia E, Jauregi A, 2013, Bologna Translation Service: Improving Access to Educational Courses Via Automatic Machine Translation. Procesamiento Del Lenguaje Natural, 2013(51): 209–212.

Piqueras Herrero A, 2020, Comparative Study between Human Translation and Statistical Machine Translation Processes for Chinese-Spanish Language Pairs, thesis, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

Pons Wendenburg C, 2024, Culturemes and Machine Translation: Evaluating Machine Translation Tools through Cultural Analysis of Tian Guan Ci Fu, thesis, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

Puigbert Moreno O, 2024, Comparison of Machine Translation and Artificial Intelligence Tools for Colloquial Chinese, thesis, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

Ruiz Costa-Jussa M, 2015, Machine Translation between Chinese and Spanish: Current State of the Field. Komputer Sapiens, 20105(1): 16–19.

Ruiz Costa-Jussa M, 2016, Integration of Machine Translation Paradigms (IMTraP). Natural Language Processing, 2016(57): 135–138.

Sun Z, 2023, The iFLYTEK Translator: Analysis and Application in the Healthcare Domain (Spanish-Chinese), thesis, Universidad de Alcalá.

Valero-Garces C, Tan Y, 2020, Analysis of Translation Students’ Attitudes Toward CAT Tools: The Perspective of Chinese-Spanish Students. CLINA: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Communication, 6(1): 69–88.

Xu S, 2022, Evaluation of Spanish-Chinese Translation Quality in DeepL and Niutrans for Legal Texts (Spanish-Chinese), thesis, Universidad de Alcalá.

Zhang H, 2019, Training Foreign Language Students in Machine Translation Post-editing, thesis, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

Zhang H, Torres-Hostench O, 2019, How to Teach Machine Translation Post-editing in Second Language Learning: A Pedagogical Proposal. Tradumàtica, 2019(17): 153–161.

Zhang H, Torres-Hostench O, 2023, The Effectiveness of Online Consultations in Machine Translation Post-editing by Foreign Language Students. Circle of Applied Linguistics for Communication, 2023(93): 289.

Zhang X, 2017, Translation of Chinese Dish Names and their Relationship with Machine Translation Tools, thesis, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

Zhi C, 2020, An Empirical Study of Spanish-Chinese Machine Translation Performance: A GNMT Case Study on Metaphorical and Metonymic Expressions. Circle of Applied Linguistics for Communication, 2020(83): 1–25.

Ji Y, 2019, Machine Translation and Post-Editing of United Nations Spanish-Language Documents: A Process-Oriented Study, thesis, Beijing Foreign Studies University.

Zhou, C, 2024, Teaching Post-Editing Skills: A Practical Framework for Spanish-Chinese Translation Courses. Happy Reading, 2024(8): 87–89.