Professional Translator vs. Google Translate: the case of Lars Larsen’s Autobiography

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Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
JournalHermes
Volume63
Pages (from-to)245-262
Number of pages17
ISSN0904-1699
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 19 Dec 2024

Keywords

  • professional translation
  • neural machine translation (NMT)
  • Google Translate (GT)
  • translation quality criteria
  • human translation parity
  • skopos theory
  • source-text analysis
  • artificial intelligence (AI)

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