Error analysis in the performance of the machine translation in translations from

English-to-Romanian and Romanian-to-English

Abstract:

Google Translate, Bing Translator, Linguee, and other machine translations have been in the
centre of attention in the last 65 years, as the lack of time, the phenomenon of globalization,
and various other reasons brought about the need to create an efficient and accurate system of
automatic translation.

Error Analysis, the branch of applied linguistics, is generally recognised for two main roles:
to investigate the process of acquiring the native language or a foreign one and to bring
remedial actions in the process of learning from the perspective of the learner and of the
teacher. However, the practical justification proposed for the study of the errors is not only to
bring efficiency and progress in the field of pedagogy, but also in translation. This area is still
unexplored, and few researchers approached the errors of the machine translations for
Romanian to English and from English to Romanian. In this paper we will present an error
analysis of the system used for these languages.

Keywords: error analysis, contrastive analysis, machine translation, evaluation of machine

translation, computational linguistics

Introduction

The concept of error analysis was coined by Corder (1981) in the belief that “a good
understanding of the nature of error is necessary before a systematic means of eradicating
them could be found”. We propose to reveal the importance of the error from perspective of
the machine translation, concentrated on two translation directions: Romanian to English and
English to Romanian.

Corder (1967), Selinker (1972), Krashen (1982), Ellis (1985), Cook (2008), and other
researchers defined error analysis, identified and classified errors, stressing the important role
of the error in the approach of foreign languages. Koponen (2010) and Stymne (2011) folloed
their models of implementing the strategy of error analysis in the assessment of machine
translations.

The machine translations are now able to provide translations of words, but also of phrases or
sections of texts. They can translate by carrying out the adjustments necessary in order to
give a “natural” translation. The best appropriate translation pattern is given by SMT
(Statistical Machine Translation). That is a machine translation paradigm, whose parameters
are bilingual text corpora, reason why the quality of its services depends on the human
translated texts, according to Karami (2014). In his works, Karami describes about Google
machine translate history, presents methods, techniques and strategies, and decodes
algorithms used in the machine translation process.

The motivations that led us to choose this topic are multiple. There are various researches
about error analysis and similar concepts that belong to the field of applied linguistics, such
contrastive analysis, interlanguage. There are numerous studies about machine translation,
the statistical machine translation system. Nevertheless, few works have dealt with studies
where types of translation errors are examined, where explanation for the sources or the
causes of errors are given. The objectives of this research are to identify and classify types of
translation errors given by some machine translations, such as Google Translate, Bing
Translator, and Linguee, The results of this study would be used to improve the quality of
translation from Romanian into English and from English into Romanian.

The data will be collected from 100 systematically selected structures from machine
translations. They will be classified, evaluated, and analysed, by taking into consideration the
direction of error analysis, translation studies, and machine translations systems’ evolution.

Conclusion:

What this paper attempts to do is to reinforce the study of Error Analysis in the process of
improve the machine translation. By proving insights about systematic deformations in
translation, the paper highlights the interference, traceable source of errors in order to
contribute to the quality of translating from Romanian into English and from English into
Romanian of machine translations. The main concern of the paper is to analyse in more
details the errors identified in the process of translating from Romanian into English and the
opposite in order to provide a contribution to the improvements of the machine translations in
this particular context.

Bibliography:

AIKEN, M., BALAN, Sh., (2011), An analysis of Google Translate accuracy. Translation
Journal,16 (2). Retrived June 26, from htttp://translationjournal.net/journal/56google.htm

CORDER, S.-P. (1967), The significance of learner’s errors, Oxford, Oxford University
Press.

CORDER, S.-P. (1981), Error analysis and interlanguage, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

DAVID, C., (1987), The Cambridge encyclopaedia of language, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press.

FASOLD, R.W., & Connor-Linton (eds.) (2006), An introduction to language and

linguistics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

JAMES, C. (1998), Errors in language learning and use, London, Longman.

KARAMI, O. (2014, January). The brief view on Google Translation Machine. Paper
presented at the meeting of the 2014 Seminar in Artificial Intelligence on Natural Language,
Germany.

KOPONEN, M. (2010), Assessing machine translation quality with error analysis. Retrieved
June 26, 2015, from https://sktl-fi.directo.fi/@Bin/40701/Koponen_MikaEL2010.pdf.
RICHARDS, J.C. (1974), Error analysis Perspective on second language acquisition,
London, Longman.

RICOEUR, P. (2005), Despre traducere, Bucureşti, Polirom.

STYMNE, S. (2011). Blast : A tool for error analysis of machin translation output. In
Proceedings of ACL (pp. 56-61). Portland, Oregon, USA.