On Literary Cadence and Emotional Expression in Prose Translation: A Comparative Analysis of Human and Machine Translation

Abstract

Modern Chinese prose takes “loose in form, unified in spirit” as its core trait, its language combining pictorial narrative, rhythmic beauty and restrained lyricism. The central demand of prose translation is therefore not merely the transfer of meaning, but the reproduction of the distinctive layers of literary cadence and the deep-lying emotion of the source text. Artificial-intelligence translation is now easily accessible, yet in the field of literary prose a marked aesthetic gap remains between machine output and the translations of experienced human translators. This paper selects three classic lyric prose works — Zhu Ziqing's "The Sight of My Father's Back" , "Transient Days" and Yu Dafu's "Autumn in the Old Capital" and takes Zhang Peiji's authoritative human translation and the machine translation produced by the AI model DeepSeek as its comparative corpus. Grounded in Nida's theory of functional equivalence, it carries out close reading and comparative analysis along two core dimensions: the reproduction of literary cadence and the expression of emotion. The study finds that Zhang Peiji's human translation attends at once to sentence rhythm, rhetorical texture and stylistic temperament, restoring both the outward cadence of the prose and the implicit emotions concealed beneath scenery, action and narrative. DeepSeek's machine translation, while guaranteeing basic semantic accuracy and grammatical fluency, is generally characterised by flattened syntax, loss of rhetorical beauty, thin emotional layering and an absence of imaginative openness, so that it can hardly achieve the aesthetic functional equivalence that literary translation demands. Drawing on cases from several types of prose, this paper summarises the differences between human and machine translation and proposes a practical pathway for literary prose translation and for human–machine collaborative translation, thereby offering a reference for research on modern Chinese prose in English translation and for the practice of literary translation.