This study focuses on evaluating the performance of machine translations (MTs) compared to human translations (HTs) in children’s literature translation (CLT) from a stylometric perspective. The research constructs a extitPeter Pan corpus, comprising 21 translations: 7 human translations (HTs), 7 large language model translations (LLMs), and 7 neural machine translation outputs (NMTs). The analysis employs a generic feature set (including lexical, syntactic, readability, and n-gram features) and a creative text translation (CTT-specific) feature set, which captures repetition, rhyme, translatability, and miscellaneous levels, yielding 447 linguistic features in total. Using classification and clustering techniques in machine learning, we conduct a stylometric analysis of these translations. Results reveal that in generic features, HTs and MTs exhibit significant differences in conjunction word distributions and the ratio of 1-word-gram-一样, while NMTs and LLMs show significant variation in descriptive words usage and adverb ratios. Regarding CTT-specific features, LLMs outperform NMTs in distribution, aligning more closely with HTs in stylistic characteristics, demonstrating the potential of LLMs in CLT.

This study explores Machine Translationese (MTese) — the linguistic peculiarities of machine translation outputs — focusing on the under-researched English-to-Chinese language pair in news texts. We construct a large dataset consisting of 4 sub-corpora and employ a comprehensive five-layer feature set. Then, a chi-square ranking algorithm is applied for feature selection in both classification and clustering tasks. Our findings confirm the presence of MTese in both Neural Machine Translation systems (NMTs) and Large Language Models (LLMs). Original Chinese texts are nearly perfectly distinguishable from both LLM and NMT outputs. Notable linguistic patterns in MT outputs are shorter sentence lengths and increased use of adversative conjunctions. Comparing LLMs and NMTs, we achieve approximately 70% classification accuracy, with LLMs exhibiting greater lexical diversity and NMTs using more brackets. Additionally, translation-specific LLMs show lower lexical diversity but higher usage of causal conjunctions compared to generic LLMs. Lastly, we find no significant differences between LLMs developed by Chinese firms and their foreign counterparts.