THE ANALYSIS OF THE TRANSLATION OF IDIOMS BY THE GOOGLE TRANSLATE MACHINE TRANSLATION PROGRAM IN THE CASE OF THE NOVELS ENTITLED "A WHOLE LIFE" AND "DER TRAFIKANT" FOR THE GERMAN-SERBIAN LANGUAGE PAIR

Authors

  • Ljiljana Tasić Filozofski fakultet u Nišu

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18485/zivjez.2023.43.1.7

Keywords:

idioms, machine translation, Google Translate, difficulties, German, Serbian

Abstract

This paper deals with the analysis of the translation of idioms from German to Serbian by the Google Translate machine translation program. The corpus consists of Robert Zettler's novels "A Whole Life" and "Der Trafikant". The objectives of the research were (1) to examine the degree of recognition of idioms depending on their type and (2) to examine the difficulties that lead to errors in the translation of idioms by this program. Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis, it was determined that the degree of recognition of semi-transparent idioms is the lowest and that these idioms are mostly translated literally. The degree of recognition of semi-transparent idioms ranks second, while full idioms are best recognized by this program. The error analysis showed that the corpus contained errors of literal translation, wrong choice, wrong meaning, and translation from English. As it turns out, various difficulties can lead to these errors, such as not recognizing idioms in the text, the lexical and structural non-correspondence, the difficulty to choose the right sememe as well as the indirect translation from English. The additional analysis of accurate translations showed that Google Translate uses idiom translation of a similar meaning and similar or different form as well as paraphrases in idiom translation.

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Published

2023-12-31

How to Cite

Tasić, L. (2023). THE ANALYSIS OF THE TRANSLATION OF IDIOMS BY THE GOOGLE TRANSLATE MACHINE TRANSLATION PROGRAM IN THE CASE OF THE NOVELS ENTITLED "A WHOLE LIFE" AND "DER TRAFIKANT" FOR THE GERMAN-SERBIAN LANGUAGE PAIR. Živi Jezici: Journal for Foreign Languages and Literatures, 43(1), 153–171. https://doi.org/10.18485/zivjez.2023.43.1.7

Issue

Vol. 43 No. 1 (2023)

Section

Translatology

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