This paper examines user reactions to the launch of the machine translation (MT) feature on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media and e-commerce platform, 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, although concerns regarding functionality, accessibility, and translation accuracy were also expressed. In addition, users actively tested the function with inputs that are atypical for everyday online communication, including stand-alone words and phrases, abbreviations, internet slang, and symbolic or encoded forms. Successful decoding of these texts elicited positive responses, while testing of more conventional language remained fairly limited. This could lead to uncritical acceptance of MT outputs by users, highlighting the importance of closer collaboration among computer scientists, translation scholars, and platform designers to improve MT performance and promote informed user engagement in real-world scenarios.

翻译：本文考察了用户对中国社交电商平台小红书于2025年1月推出的机器翻译功能的反应。基于从11篇宣传该翻译功能的官方帖子中收集的6723条评论数据，本文结合情感分析与主题分析方法，探究用户对该功能的感知与试用情况。研究结果显示，用户反应总体积极，但也存在对功能性、可访问性及翻译准确性的担忧。此外，用户积极使用非日常在线交流的典型输入（包括孤立单词与短语、缩略语、网络用语及符号化或编码形式）对该功能进行测试。成功解码这些文本时用户反应积极，而对常规语言的测试仍相当有限。这可能导致用户对机器翻译输出产生非批判性接受，凸显了计算机科学家、翻译学者与平台设计者之间密切协作的必要性，以提升机器翻译性能并促进现实场景中用户的有意识参与。