How much Romanian does Google Translate know?

Abstract

To compensate, even if on a small scale, for the scarcity of investigations of English-into-Romanian machine translations from a corpus-based genre-specific perspective, this case study concerns the quality of such translation outcomes in the particular case of two different, but closely related, text genres – everyday and newspaper/ news releases language, that have been translated with the help of Google Translate. The paper starts from Keshavarz’s (1999) very general model of error analysis to create a linguistic error profile in the two genres taken into consideration. The errors identified and discussed are illustrated with small-scale corpus examples. Since they reflect the capabilities of the Google translation platform, the findings of this paper may be relevant for its developers to get a clearer picture of its strengths and limitations and suggest ways of improving it so that it can ultimately provide higher quality translations. It may also contribute to raising translators’ attention to which areas are potentially problematic when they work, in the post-editing stage, with the English-Romanian language pair, with the particular text genres considered here.