A comparative study on google translate: An error analysis of Turkish-to English translations in terms of the text typology of Katherina Reiss
Betül KOÇER GÜLDAL, Korkut Uluç İŞİSAĞ · RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi :/RumeliDe Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi · 2019
Machine Translation (MT) has become one of the important topics of public interest especially with the advent of technology and the blooming need for translation. Google Translate, as an MT, provides quick translations; however, the quality of the texts often remains unsatisfactory. This study aims to analyze the translation errors of Google Translate outputs conducted from Turkish into English. The errors are classified into four major categories: Lexical Errors, Morphological Errors, Syntactic Errors, Semantic and Pragmatic Errors, which include subcategories. In parallel with the aim of the study, a text from each of the three text types put forward by Katherina Reiss (1971), was chosen to be translated by Google Translate and to be analyzed. These text types are Informative Texts, Expressive Texts, and Operative Texts. In the study, firstly it is aimed to explore which of the main text types has more translation errors, secondly, whether the translation error types vary by the main text types or not. In order to deal with this, both quantitative and qualitative analyses are utilized in the study. The data analysis revealed that the main text type that has more translation errors is the translation of operative text and expressive text, respectively. It is also observed that the error pattern between the text types was different. The informative text mainly includes lexical errors, whereas operative and expressive mainly include semantic and pragmatic errors. Summing up the results, it can be concluded that although Google Translate provides much quicker translations among a large number of languages, there is still a need for human assistance.