A Contrastive Analysis of Machine Translation (Google Translate) and Human Translation: Efficacy in Translating Verb Tense from English to Persian

Abstract

This study aims to examine the efficiency of Google translation in translating verb tense from English to Persian, the acceptable translation of Google translation, and the areas of possible errors in the Google translation. To this end, Google translated four passages of Oliver Twist. The Google translations were compared with the translation of Gharib based on the selected codes for the domain and extent of errors. The results were analyzed and evaluated in terms of accuracy and appropriateness. The findings of the study showed that Google Translate is not able to translate verb tense from English to Persian and the translated passages are not acceptable. Also, most of the grammatical errors occurred in translation of aspects, passives, and compounds, respectively.