Machine Translation in the Wild: User Reaction to Xiaohongshu's Built-In Translation Feature

The growing integration of machine translation into social media platforms is transforming how users interact with each other across cultural and linguistic boundaries. This paper examines user reactions to the launch of Xiaohongshu's built-in translation feature in January 2025. Drawing on a dataset of 6,723 comments collected from 11 official posts promoting the translation function, this paper combines sentiment analysis with thematic analysis to investigate how users perceived and experimented with the function. Results show that reactions were generally positive, particularly for translating posts and comments, although concerns regarding functionality, accessibility, and translation accuracy were also expressed. In addition to evaluative feedback, users actively tested the function with diverse inputs, including words and phrases in English and Chinese, abbreviations in pinyin, internet slang, and other language forms such as emoji, kaomoji, coded texts, etc. The findings highlight the importance of closer collaboration among computer scientists, translation scholars, and platform designers to better understand and improve translation technologies in real world communicative context.

Prompting ChatGPT for Translation: A Comparative Analysis of Translation Brief and Persona Prompts

Prompt engineering in LLMs has shown potential for improving translation quality. However, the potential of incorporating translation concepts in prompt design remains largely underexplored. Against this backdrop, this paper discusses the effectiveness of incorporating the conceptual tool of translation brief and the personas of translator and author into prompt design for translation tasks in ChatGPT. Findings suggest that, although certain elements are constructive in facilitating human to human communication for translation tasks, their effectiveness is limited for improving translation quality in ChatGPT. This accentuates the need for more explorative research on how translation theorists and practitioners can develop the current set of conceptual tools rooted in the human to human communication paradigm for translation purposes in this emerging workflow involving human machine interaction.