Author

Nicole Howell

Bound Volume Number

Volume V

Degree Type

Honors Capstone Project

Date of Submission

Spring 5-2016

Capstone Advisor

Maria Emma Ticio Quesada

Capstone Major

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics

Capstone College

Arts and Science

Audio/Visual Component

no

Keywords

the differences between human and machine translation

Capstone Prize Winner

no

Won Capstone Funding

no

Honors Categories

Humanities

Subject Categories

Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature

Abstract

Machine translation systems experience a trade-off between efficiency and efficacy: while quicker and easier than human translation, machine translations are less accurate and comprehensible.

This study analyzes two sets of English to Spanish translations to compare the differences between human and machine translation and evaluate the performance of machine translation. Google Translate—the best-performing machine translator—represents machine translation as a whole in producing English to Spanish translations of the given text. The primary investigator—a non-native speaker and graduating student of Spanish Language, Literature & Culture at Syracuse University—serves as the benchmark for the average non-native speaker of Spanish at the advanced-mid level of proficiency. Findings are divided into four groups: lexical findings, sentential findings, phrasal findings, and stylistic findings.

From these findings, the study is able to establish that machine translation struggles to decipher context, which results in errors in word choice and lack of proper technical language; displays inconsistency in its errors, and lacks the capability to learn. Such individual findings led to the overall conclusion that Google Translate—and thus machine translation—performs below the level of an average non-native speaker of Spanish.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.