机器翻译的发展与应用为反思与启示翻译主体、过程与产品三大翻译本质问题提供了机译视角。在当前弱人工智能时代,翻译主体介于机器与人类之间,机译促使翻译劳动分工与译者身份泛化,衬托出人译宝贵价值;翻译过程处于人译多元转化与机译概率匹配之间,两者翻译过程差异性或源自不同翻译观:前者所持有的是一种由外而内的动态翻译观,后者采用的是一种由内而外的静态翻译观;翻译产品定位于功能与意义之间,机译能够实现翻译的文内功能,但不一定传递文外意义,太过注重机译的功能而忽略人译的意义,可能造成语言“污染”与语感钝化。

The development and application of machine translation provides a machine-translation perspective to reflect and shed light on the three key questions of translation in nature, i.e. translator, process, and product. In this weak AI era, as the translator overlaps between machine and human, machine translation facilitates the division of labour in translation but generalizes the translator’s identity, proving the great value of human translation; as translation process dichotomizes between human translation’s multiple transformation and machine translation’s probabilistic matching, their differences may be rooted in their different translation views: the former holds a dynamic outside-inside view of translation, while the latter adopts a static inside-outside view of translation; as translation products serve functionally and connotationally, machine translation can achieve the intratextual functions, but not necessarily convey extratextual connotations. Too much attention paid to the function of machine translation at the cost of human translation’s connotations can result in linguistic “pollution” and language sense “lossing”.