TY - JOUR
T1 - Professional Translator vs. Google Translate
T2 - the case of Lars Larsen’s Autobiography
AU - Schjoldager, Anne
AU - Jensen, Helle Dam
AU - Christensen, Tina Paulsen
AU - Bundgaard, Kristine
PY - 2024/12/19
Y1 - 2024/12/19
N2 - Wishing to contribute to a necessary discussion of how the task of translation should be conceptualised in our posthuman world, the paper investigates what characterises a professional translation completely unaided by translation technology and compares it with a translation generated by Google Translate (GT), a well-known and free neural machine translation (NMT), based on artificial intelligence (AI). The source text is Lars Larsen’s Danish-language autobiography from 2004, assessed as particularly challenging to translate because of many instances of contextually and culturally embedded meaning. Analyses are carried out in three steps: (1) a textual analysis of the source text; (2) a skopos-theoretical analysis of the professional translation; and (3) comparative analyses of the two translations. In terms of wording, two thirds of the translations are assessed as sufficiently similar to conclude that these parts of the GT translation achieve professional translation quality. The remaining parts are sufficiently different to conclude that professional quality is not achieved by GT. The professional translator complies with professional ethics and Vermeer’s hierarchy of rules and succeeds in solving all predefined translation problems, while this is not the case for GT. The reason may be that GT does not understand text in the real sense of the word, does not work situationally and goal-oriented and does not base decisions on professional expertise and ethics. While we are looking into a future with increasingly advanced translation technology, we should not lose sight of what is expected of a professional translation.
AB - Wishing to contribute to a necessary discussion of how the task of translation should be conceptualised in our posthuman world, the paper investigates what characterises a professional translation completely unaided by translation technology and compares it with a translation generated by Google Translate (GT), a well-known and free neural machine translation (NMT), based on artificial intelligence (AI). The source text is Lars Larsen’s Danish-language autobiography from 2004, assessed as particularly challenging to translate because of many instances of contextually and culturally embedded meaning. Analyses are carried out in three steps: (1) a textual analysis of the source text; (2) a skopos-theoretical analysis of the professional translation; and (3) comparative analyses of the two translations. In terms of wording, two thirds of the translations are assessed as sufficiently similar to conclude that these parts of the GT translation achieve professional translation quality. The remaining parts are sufficiently different to conclude that professional quality is not achieved by GT. The professional translator complies with professional ethics and Vermeer’s hierarchy of rules and succeeds in solving all predefined translation problems, while this is not the case for GT. The reason may be that GT does not understand text in the real sense of the word, does not work situationally and goal-oriented and does not base decisions on professional expertise and ethics. While we are looking into a future with increasingly advanced translation technology, we should not lose sight of what is expected of a professional translation.
KW - machine translation
KW - human translation
KW - culture-specific items in translation
KW - Google Translate
KW - neural machine translation
KW - autobiography
KW - professional translation
KW - neural machine translation (NMT)
KW - Google Translate (GT)
KW - translation quality criteria
KW - human translation parity
KW - skopos theory
KW - source-text analysis
KW - artificial intelligence (AI)
UR - https://tidsskrift.dk/her/article/view/143079/194963
U2 - 10.7146/hjlcb.vi63.143079
DO - 10.7146/hjlcb.vi63.143079
M3 - Journal article
SN - 0904-1699
VL - 63
SP - 245
EP - 262
JO - Hermes
JF - Hermes
ER -