In order to solve the problems of time-consuming and frequent mistranslations in traditional translation methods, this study designed an English-Chinese machine translation method based on transfer learning. On the basis of analyzing the basic principles and specific strategies of English-Chinese machine translation, the traditional neural machine translation methods are analyzed, and then the translation process is optimized by transfer learning. On the basis of preprocessing English-Chinese translation text data, features of English-Chinese translation text are extracted, features of English-Chinese translation text are rapidly classified by feature transfer learning, and machine models of English-Chinese translation are constructed based on the classification results. The objective of feature transfer learning is to reuse the past knowledge obtained in the form of dataset to be utilized for another target data. The findings of the experiment show the effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving the design expectation. The benefit of the proposed method includes a short translation time and fewer mistranslations.