Application and Challenges of Information Theory in English Translation and Cross-cultural Communication

Abstract

With the deepening of China's foreign exchange, the importance of translation is becoming more and more prominent, but some scholars and translators still have great misunderstandings about translation, and translation has been in a neglected position. Aiming at this phenomenon, this paper introduces information theory into English translation and cross-cultural communication. It proposes an automatic translation control method based on the information entropy model to improve the accuracy and efficiency of translation. It expands the lexicon based on the information entropy model, which is divided into basic lexicon, specialized lexicon, and neologism lexicon. Then, it constructs a semantic model to complete the automated extraction of lexicon features and realize automatic translation. The transfer of language information and the modification of terminological structure are discussed in cross-cultural communication to improve the challenges of English translation and cross-cultural communication. During the translation process, the correlation between the entropy of Chinese and English corresponding unitary, binary, and ternary words - sentence entropy decreases gradually (0.993->0.977->0.972). The largest value of information entropy loss in different cultural contexts is caused by the tonal-phonetic contrast of combining yinping and declination. The relative degree of information loss is 5.300585%. This study has provided new perspectives for translation research through the use of redundant information theory and discrete information theory.

Keywords

• information entropy model
• mutual information
• thesaurus
• english translation
• cross-cultural communication
• 68-02