Adequacy in Machine vs. Human Translation: A Comparative Study of English and Persian Languages

Abstract

Adequacy as the extent to which translation corresponds to the source text has always been a salient feature of any machine translation service. For this reason, the main objective of this comparative study was to analyze and compare translation adequacy in machine vs. human translation from English into the Persian language. In other words, this study sought to investigate whether machine translation product was adequate enough as compared to human translation. For this purpose, seven various texts were selected and translated from Persian to English by two translation students as well as machine translation services including Google Translate and Bing Translation. In addition, a reference translation by two expert translators was prepared against which human and machine translations were compared and analyzed. Moreover, the Sketch Engine software was exploited to analyze the translations. The results of the study revealed that there was no statistically significant difference between human and machine translations as compared to the reference translation and that machine translations were adequately appropriate translations. The findings of this research might have useful implications for research in the field of machine translations. In addition, the results of this research have practical implications for those who are interested in doing research in machine translation.

A Study of the Utility of Artificial Translation in English Reading Comprehension

“…English reading is an important way for students to understand and acquire international information and knowledge, so the strength of English discourse reading ability determines whether a student can effectively acquire international details [1][2][3]. Discourse reading means reading a formally articulated and semantically coherent linguistic whole.…”