ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Digital Learning Innovations
Evaluating the Impact of AI-powered Translation Tools on Business English Translation Instruction: A Comparative Study Across Text Genres and Language Directions
Provisionally accepted
Xiaqing Liu1,2,3*
Qiaoli Yu2- 1Western Sydney University, Penrith, Australia
- 2Yantai Institute of Technology, Yantai, China
- 3Shandong Technology and Business University, Yantai, China
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With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, AI-powered translation tools (APTTs) such as DeepL, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek have been widely incorporated into business English translation (BET) instruction. Through the integration of quantitative performance analysis and qualitative questionnaire feedback, this study examines how APTTs affect students' translation competence in bidirectional translation tasks, namely English-Chinese (E-C) and Chinese-English (C-E) tasks, across four genres: business letters, advertisements, market reports, and business contracts. This study tracked the BET performance of 78 undergraduates over a 16-week instructional period based on a pre-and post-test empirical design. BET outcomes were evaluated based on both BLEU scores and human judgment for the final between-group comparison. At the end of the term, a follow-up questionnaire was administered to 158 participants to explore their perceptions and interactive experiences with APTTs. The experimental group outperformed the control group when handling structured genres such as market reports and business contracts. As for the language directions, students gained more significant improvements in E-C tasks (F = 12.860, p < 0.001, η² = 0.145), with their strongest impact observed in rule-governed, structured genres. Meanwhile, APTTs showed limitations in C-E translation of creative genres full of intensive cultural nuances, where contextual adaptation was essential. According to the survey results, a vast majority of students recognized APTTs' benefits in terms of improving translation efficiency and linguistic accuracy, yet there were still over three-quarters expressing their concerns about the potential risk of excessive reliance on APTTs. This study examines the practical application of APTTs and sheds light on the strategic use of APTTs within BET instruction.
Keywords: AI-powered translation tools (APTTs), business English translation (BET) instruction, pedagogical model, Text genre, Translation direction, translationquality
Received: 01 Jul 2025; Accepted: 19 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Liu and Yu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xiaqing Liu
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