Considering Machine Translation (MT) as an Aid or a Threat to the Human Translator:

Abstract

The present study aims to evaluate the output quality of an online MT; namely, Google Translate, from English into Persian and compare its output with the translations made by the human translators to find out that whether MT applications are considered as an aid or a threat to human translators. For the application of the study, the researcher designed a translation test consisting of 60 statements from different types of texts proposed by Reiss (1989). The translation test was translated via Google Translate and administrated to three human translators to be rendered. The translations made by Google Translate and by the three human translators alongside the 60 statements were given to 40 judges to be evaluated based on Dorr et al. s' (2010) criterion of MT quality assessment, including semantic adequacy, fluency, and understandability. As results indicated, Google Translate gave a good overall performance in the translation of the 60 statements into Persian in terms of semantic adequacy and understandability, but not in terms of fluency. Thus, there should be no fear of human translators being replaced by the MT. As conclusion, MT applications cannot be considered a threat to human translators, but as an aid for them. The present study also offers some recommendations that can be beneficial to translation students, trainee translators, translation teachers, and professional translators.