A Comparative Study of the Products of Machine Translations and Human Translations in the Field of Literary Translation.

Abstract

Translations can be mainly categorized as technical and non-technical translations. Literary translations which belongs to the category of non-technical translations are considered to be challenging than technical translations. With the modern technology, the manual translation has been replaced by machine translation and it is popular due to its easiness, inexpensiveness and it is time saving. The aim of this study is to identify the issues regarding Machine Translation in comparison to manual translation related to literary translations. Data was collected by comparing “Malagiya Aththo” written by Ediriweera Sarachchandra and its Japanese translation “Nakibito|” by Tadashi Noguchi with the translation gained through Google Translate. Selected sentences which include cultural terms have been translated through Google translate and they were compared with the original text. In this comparison, it is clear that the manual translation has performed better than the Machine translation. It is because, in the manual translation, the translator has used precise words in Japanese (L2) for the cultural terms appeared in the original text, without harming its original meaning. Therefore, the reader may not get the feeling that he is reading a translation. In contrast, the machine translator always provides with inaccurate terms, which in fact changed the meaning of those sentences. While human translator has captured a greater referential cohesion of literature, Google translations has performed less in capturing literary cohesion. Translation of literature is a far more creative art than other types of translations. Software can translate many words quickly, but still it cannot express the meaning of a sentence exactly as a human translator can. In Literary translations, Human Translation is more effective than Machine Translation. Therefore, Human translation remains the most reliable, most accurate form of translation.