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Comparison 8 min

Chinese-English PDF Translation: GLM vs DeepSeek vs Human

Chinese-English PDF Translation: GLM vs DeepSeek vs Human

Same Chinese Economics Paper: Three Versions Compared

A 15-page paper on the digital economy from the Journal of Finance and Economics (2024, Issue 3). Three versions: GLM-4.5-Air, DeepSeek V3.2, and a human translator with economics background. Five scoring dimensions.

Results

DimensionGLM-4.5-AirDeepSeek V3.2Human
Terminology consistency8.07.29.5
ZH to EN (academic)7.87.59.2
EN to ZH7.58.09.3
Cultural metaphor handling7.06.58.5
Total36.536.245.0

Surprise Finding

DeepSeek V3.2 outperformed GLM-4.5-Air on EN→ZH. Possibly due to DeepSeek higher EN:ZH ratio in pretraining data. But GLM leads on ZH→EN — results show each engine has directional strengths.

Human translators lead significantly on terminology and cultural metaphors — expected. The biggest gap: cultural metaphor. "内卷" → DeepSeek: "involution", GLM: "overcompetition", human: contextual choice between "excessive competition" or "involution" with annotation.

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