Contemporary Issues of Machine Translation in the Field of Law – A Contrastive Analysis

Abstract

We live in the age of constant changes and tremendous development of information technologies in all spheres of human activity. The field of translation is not exempted from these changes and developments. In this paper we shall explore the achievements of computer techologies in the field of machine translation. The research is conducted on the machine translations of four legal text in the field of EU legislation from German into Croatian language. The method used is a contrastive analysis of translations performed by two online translators: Google Translate and Microsoft Bing Translator. In the introductory part, specific features of the translation in the field of law are presented. In the theoretical introduction to the research, approaches to machine translations are discussed with specific reference to the editing and post-editing phases of translation procedure. Based on a number of features that represent challenges in translating legal texts, our hypothesis is that in translating legal texts these specific features have to be considered and that an intervention of a skilled human translator mastering both the linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge is necessary, at least in a post-editing phase. In the empirical part, four different texts from the field of EU legislations are translated by using Google Translate and Microsoft Bing Translator. The translations are then contrastively analysed against the error analysis criteria developed by Costa and Popović Popović. In the final part of the paper, qualitative and quantitative analysis of findings are conducted, types of errors ocurring in both machine translations discussed, and conclusions drawn.