(LUẬN văn THẠC sĩ) the quality of google translates vietnamese translations of english film titles

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING QUY NHON UNIVERSITY TRẦN THỊ THANH HUYỀN THE QUALITY OF GOOGLE TRANSLATE’S VIETNAMESE TRANSLATIONS OF ENGLISH FILM TITLES Field: English Language Code: 8220201 Supervisor: LÊ NHÂN THÀNH, PhD Binh Dinh, October 2021 download by : skknchat@gmail.com BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN TRẦN THỊ THANH HUYỀN CHẤT LƯỢNG DỊCH TIÊU ĐỀ FILMS TIẾNG ANH SANG TIẾNG VIỆT CỦA GOOGLE TRANSLATE Chuyên ngành: Ngôn Ngữ Anh Mã số: 8220201 Người hướng dẫn: TS LÊ NHÂN THÀNH Bình Định, 10/2021 download by : skknchat@gmail.com i STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I now confirm that I am the author of the thesis on the quality of Google Translate‟s Vietnamese translations of English film titles This topic is the result of my research, except for the references mentioned in the thesis Furthermore, I also certify that I have never submitted this thesis to any other academic institutions Quy Nhon, 2021 Student Trần Thị Thanh Huyền download by : skknchat@gmail.com ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would love to express my deep and sincere gratitude to all those who helped me finish this thesis First and foremost, I would like to express my boundless gratitude and sincere respect to my supervisor, Dr Le Nhan Thanh, for his enthusiastic guidance, unconditional help, valuable suggestions, and timely encouragement Without these things, I would not have been able to complete my thesis Secondly, I would like to express my indebtedness to the lecturers of the Foreign Languages Department at Quy Nhon University for providing valuable knowledge, giving me enthusiastic help, and creating a great learning environment during my course here Thirdly, my warm thanks are to my classmates of the 22nd MA Course on the English Language at Quy Nhon University Without their deep sympathy and valuable support, I could not have completed this course Last but not least, I wish to send my profound gratitude to my family, friends, and colleagues Their precious encouragement and boundless love were the motivation for me to finish the thesis download by : skknchat@gmail.com iii ABSTRACT This study evaluated the quality of Google Translate (GT)‘s Vietnamese translations of English film titles Today, the need to communicate is a must, but the language barrier is an obstacle Therefore, GT, a free direct translation tool, has been widespread So far, GT's translation quality has not shown high reliability, so it needs much research The research questions were: (1) What are the error types in GT‘s Vietnamese translations of the English film titles? (2) What are the frequencies of the translation errors in GT‘s Vietnamese translations of the English film titles in terms of translation error types? To complete these questions, 130 English film titles with suggested Vietnamese translations and GT‘s translations were analyzed through Farrús, Costa-jussà, Marin˜o, & Fonollosa‘s (2010) translation error classification with orthographic, morphological, lexical, semantic, and syntactic errors Besides, content analysis, both qualitatively and quantitatively, was used to analyze the data The first finding is that GT produces no morphological errors and commits four error types: orthographic, lexical, semantic, and syntactic errors Second, the highest rate belongs to semantic errors The study is helpful for GT users, GT developers, and researchers The findings suggest that users should consider film contexts when using GT to translate film titles The conclusion is that GT fails to translate English film titles into Vietnamese, committing four broad error types at high rates, because it cannot consider films‘ context Key words: English film titles, Vietnamese, Google Translate, errors, translation quality download by : skknchat@gmail.com iv TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii ABSTRACT iii LIST OF TABLES vii LIST OF FIGURES viii Chapter INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale 1.2 Aim and Objectives 1.2.1 Aim 1.2.2 Objectives 1.3 Research Questions 1.4 Scope of the Study 1.5 Significance of the Study 1.6 Organization of the Study Chapter LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Film Titles 2.1.1 Introduction to film titles 2.1.2 Functions of film titles 2.1.3 Characteristics of film titles 2.2 Translation 2.2.1 Definition of translation 2.2.2 Translation process 10 2.2.3 Translation methods 13 2.3 Machine Translation 15 2.3.1 An overview of Machine Translation 15 2.3.2 Google Translate 17 2.4 Error Analysis 23 download by : skknchat@gmail.com v 2.4.1 Translation errors 23 2.4.2 Translation error classifications 24 2.4.3 The conceptual framework for the thesis 26 2.5 Film Title Translation 30 2.5.1 Film title translation strategies 30 2.5.2 A review of the previous studies on the translation of film titles 31 2.6 Translation Quality Assessment 32 Chapter METHODOLOGY 35 3.1 Research Methods 35 3.2 Data Collection 37 3.3 Data Analysis 39 Chapter FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 42 4.1 Translation Error Types in GT‘s Vietnamese Translations 42 4.2 Frequencies of the Translation Errors in GT‘s Vietnamese Translations of the English Film Titles 44 4.2.1 No errors 44 4.2.2 Translation error sub-types in GT‘s Vietnamese translations 46 4.3 Quality of Google Translate in Translating Film Titles from English into Vietnamese 63 Chapter CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS 65 5.1 Summary of the Main Findings 65 5.2 Limitations of the Study 69 5.3 Implications of the Study 70 5.3.1 Implications for teachers and students of translation 70 5.3.2 Implications for translators 71 5.3.3 Implications for other researchers 71 PUBLICATION 73 REFERENCES 74 download by : skknchat@gmail.com vi ABBREVIATIONS GT: Google Translate MQM: Multidimensional Quality Metric MT: Machine Translation SL: Source language TL: Target language download by : skknchat@gmail.com vii LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 Title Distinctions annotated for in the taxonomy Model table for English film titles and GT‘s Vietnamese translations The model table for the data Occurrences of translation errors and No errors in GT‘s Vietnamese translations Occurrences of translation error types in GT‘s Vietnamese translations Frequencies of translation error sub-types in GT‘s Vietnamese translations Page 25 39 41 43 43 47 4.4 Frequencies of morphological errors 48 4.5 Frequencies of orthographic errors 51 4.6 Frequencies of syntactic errors 53 4.7 Frequencies of lexical errors 58 4.8 Frequencies of semantic errors 60 download by : skknchat@gmail.com viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Title Page 2.1 The process of translation (Larson, 1984) 11 2.2 The process of translation (Newmark, 1988) 11 2.3 The various factors that impinge semantically on a text 12 2.4 Eight methods of translation 13 2.5 2.6 MQM error categories used for inter-annotator agreement Hierarchical structure of the error typology download by : skknchat@gmail.com 26 27 65 Chapter CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS Chapter presents the main findings on film title translation quality by GT from the analysis results Moreover, the limitations and implications are also considered in this chapter 5.1 Summary of the Main Findings This thesis was conducted to evaluate the quality of GT‘s Vietnamese translations of English film titles To complete the research aim, the thesis must answer two research questions: What are the error types in GT‘s Vietnamese translations of the English film titles? What are the frequencies of the translation errors in GT‘s Vietnamese translations of the English film titles in terms of translation error types? This thesis used the Hierarchical structure of the error typology of Farrús et al (2010) as the conceptual framework This framework has five broad error types and their sub-types These types and their descriptions were mentioned in the Literature review The research results show that GT fails to transfer English film titles to Vietnamese ones The data indicated that among 130 film titles, only 16 English film titles with 12.3 % were translated correctly, and 114 film titles were mistranslated The percentage of translation errors is above seven times higher than the rate of No errors In short, GT is not successful in translating film titles from English to Vietnamese because GT's correct translation rate is low Or we can state that GT shows the bad Vietnamese translation quality of English film titles 114 incorrect translations of film titles accounted for 87.7 %, and these inaccurate translations covered four broad translation error types: download by : skknchat@gmail.com 66 orthographic errors, lexical errors, semantic errors, and syntactic errors GT did not make any errors of morphological errors Moreover, GT was free in some sub-types of orthographic errors, including punctuation and spelling errors And GT did not commit the sub-types of syntactic errors with conjunction, preposition, and article errors In short, the quality of GT‘s Vietnamese translations of English film titles is low and unreliable due to two reasons: The total number of inaccurate translations (114) is much higher than that of accurate translations (16) Of all inaccurate translations, GT produced four (orthographic errors, lexical errors, semantic errors, and syntactic errors) among five error types with high percentage levels The followings are the summary of main findings from the broad types: morphological errors, orthographic errors, syntactic errors, lexical errors, and semantic errors In terms of morphological errors, GT did not produce any cases of this error type It means that GT did not have any difficulty in deal with morphological errors No instances of morphological errors are due to the difference in English and Vietnamese English has suffixes to express the changes in words, so it is a variable language Otherwise, suffixes not exist in Vietnamese; therefore, Vietnamese is not an inconsistent language In short, Vietnamese invariability leads to no morphological errors in the translations of film titles from English to Vietnamese Orthographic errors were in the fourth position among five broad error types GT got the perfect quality in punctuation and spelling errors with no error cases Capitalization errors happened because GT may not realize the standards of capital letters‘ rules between the SL and the TL Syntactic errors were in the third position among five error types No download by : skknchat@gmail.com 67 errors in conjunction, preposition, and article prove GT‘s success in terms of these sub-types However, other sub-types of syntactic errors existed with different levels The highest cases were for syntactic element reordering errors Besides, some cases involved category errors These errors happen because film titles have a close relationship with the contents and contexts of the films Moreover, this machine translator is often operated with the wordby-word translation mechanism These things lead to the appearance of syntactic errors With the view to lexical errors, there were fewer extra word errors than missing word errors There were fewer extra words since GT hardly skips words; it translates every word presented because it is only a type of machine Missing words and extra words occurred in the film titles because film titles are named after the film contents GT is a machine, so it does not grasp the film's contexts In conclusion, GT meets the difficulties with both sub-types of lexical errors And lexical errors were in the second rank among error types generated by GT Among the total 141 translation errors, semantic errors belonged to the group with the most occurrences with 104 times That GT performs poorly in the semantic field is understandable Semantic errors deal with the lexical meanings of words As we know, an English word includes many meaning fields, and GT often chooses the most popular meanings Also, selecting the meanings for film titles almost depend on the contents of the films Accordingly, when the contexts decide the choice of word meanings, semantic errors happen naturally GT is free from morphological errors However, GT commits the other four error types: orthographic errors, syntactic errors, lexical errors, and semantic errors with high percentages According to Farrús et al (2010), download by : skknchat@gmail.com 68 syntactic errors, lexical errors, and semantic errors have much influence on readers‘ comprehension of TL texts Therefore, these error types affect translation quality Additionally, GT commits semantic errors at a large percentage A good translation must ensure accuracy in the semantic aspect because the semantic meaning conveys the ideas of the speakers or the writers From the rate of the semantic errors, it is logical to conclude that GT gives bad translations in translating English film titles into Vietnamese ones Accordingly, the percentages of incorrect translations and the high rate of error types in the conceptual framework of Farrús et al (2010) have proved the quality of GT in translating film titles from English to Vietnamese The conclusion for the thesis is that GT does not perform well in translating film titles from English to Vietnamese The existence of these errors is due to some following reasons Firstly, to have qualified translated versions, translators must grasp the knowledge of many fields, from the economy, politics to education and entertainment However, it is apparent that translators only focus on one major, so it is not easy to know the knowledge of all fields Moreover, to have accurate translations, translators should show competence in the SL and the TL Languages deal with many aspects, among which are vocabulary and grammatical rules However, vocabulary and grammatical rules vary differently in different languages The translators can encounter challenges when dealing with the usage of grammar and the choice of word meanings Furthermore, culture is a prominent element in a language Something may be accepted in this culture but unaccepted in another When misunderstandings between cultures happen, accurate translations are impossible Translators who overcome cultural gaps can produce correct download by : skknchat@gmail.com 69 translations The last reason is also one of the most important ones This reason deals with the functions and characteristics of film titles As presented in the Literature review, film titles must ensure vocative, informative, expressive, and aesthetic functions Moreover, they also have to guarantee language characteristics, cultural characteristics, and aesthetic characteristics Together with these things, film titles must convey the film contents These requirements of film titles are the challenges for translators To have qualified film titles, translators must know a variety of fields However, GT is only a type of MT It depends on the data provided for the internet by developers to complete their duty of translation The more texts are input into the system, the higher the translation quality is Therefore, it is a challenge for GT to become a good machine translator in every field And this study proves that GT is not a good machine translator in translating English film titles into Vietnamese ones However, we must confess that GT brings many advantages to our lives Thanks to GT, translators can save much time and effort in the duty of translation Hopefully, in the future, developers and managers can help GT overcome the weaknesses it has today GT can be improved to be a better and better machine translator in every field 5.2 Limitations of the Study The study gained the research aim, but the researcher is aware of the study's limitations The followings are the shortcomings of the thesis Firstly, with only 130 English film titles and GT‘s Vietnamese translations, the error types and their frequencies may not be representative of all English film titles and their corresponding Vietnamese ones Finally, due to the different characteristics of languages, it is not easy to download by : skknchat@gmail.com 70 find any framework suitable for all kinds of contexts The framework of Farrus et al (2010) is not perfect, too It does not contain pragmatic errors 5.3 Implications of the Study The research aim is to evaluate the quality of GT‘s Vietnamese translations of English film titles Hopefully, the main findings of the thesis will be of significance to those interested in translation and film title translation This section introduces the implications for teachers and students of translation, translators, and other researchers 5.3.1 Implications for teachers and students of translation The research results of the thesis bring benefits to teachers and students with a major in translation Firstly, the thesis guides them on recognizing translation error types of film titles generated by GT These error types include capitalization of orthographic errors, syntactic element reordering and category errors of syntactic errors, extra words and missing words of lexical errors, and semantic errors Additionally, the results also reveal the weaknesses of GT when translating English film titles into Vietnamese ones GT made orthographic errors, syntactic errors, lexical errors, and semantic errors in increasing proportions And the strength of GT is that it did not commit any cases of morphological errors Besides, GT generated semantic errors with the highest level, compared with the remaining error types Also, the findings make teachers and students realize that when translating a film title from the SL to the TL, translators need to pay attention to the film contents Besides, translators must guarantee the functions and characteristics of film titles Lastly, teachers can use the research results of the thesis to design download by : skknchat@gmail.com 71 appropriate and realistic teaching plans for students majoring in film title translation 5.3.2 Implications for translators All phenomena have two sides: the good side and the bad one And GT also brings advantages and disadvantages for translators GT can produce translations in a moment, but not all of them are correct As a result, depending absolutely on GT in translation is a bad idea for translators The results confirm that GT produced few correct translations in transferring English film titles to Vietnamese ones Among the total of 130 English film titles, GT only generated 16 accurate translations Besides, GT committed semantic errors with the highest frequency when translating 114 film titles In other words, using GT in translating film titles gives many incorrect pieces of translation Thus, it is logical to advise that translators should be careful when using GT to translate film titles Translators should pay attention to the following aspects to get the perfect translations of film titles Firstly, they should use this thesis as a reference to eliminate the errors by GT during the process of translation Secondly, they must consider the functions and characteristics of film titles Finally, with the knowledge of translation, translators can have necessary modifications in translations of GT to meet film contents and cultural background without changing the target meanings of film titles 5.3.3 Implications for other researchers Some suggestions for further research are as follows Firstly, the length of translation put into GT should be longer to provide contexts for its translations This may ensure a better examination of GT‘s translation quality download by : skknchat@gmail.com 72 Finally, another translation error framework which includes pragmatic errors should be used to investigate GT‘s translation quality in translating film titles from English to Vietnamese To sum up, GT is a convenient and fast tool because it can give a translation immediately However, GT does not gain good results in translating English film titles into Vietnamese ones In particular, GT gets many errors related to semantic ones Moreover, users should avoid orthographic, syntactic, lexical, and semantic errors by GT to choose the suggested translations accurately after considering the elements such as cultural backgrounds, the film contents, and the TL and the SL contexts download by : skknchat@gmail.com 73 PUBLICATION Trần, T T H., & Lê, N T (2021) The quality of Google Translate‘s Vietnamese translations of English film titles Journal of Science – Quy Nhon University 15(4), 69-75 https://doi.org/10.52111/qnjs 2021.15407 download by : skknchat@gmail.com 74 REFERENCES English sources Ailan, D (2016) A study of film title translation from 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Massachusetts: Focal Press Weatherson, B (2016) Category mistakes download by : skknchat@gmail.com 79 Retrieved from http://tar.weatherson.org/2006/12/15/category mistakes/ Weber, R P (1990) Basic content analysis Beverly Hills, CA: Sage White, M D., & Marsh, E E (2006) Content analysis: a flexible methodology Library Trends, 55(1), 22–45 Vietnamese source Toàn trường hợp phải viết hoa văn theo Nghị định 30 (2020) Truy cập từ https://luatvietnam.vn/hanh-chinh/cac-truong-hopphai-viet-hoa-theo-nghi-dinh-30-570-24161-article.html Online dictionary http://tratu.soha.vn/dict/en_vn/ https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ download by : skknchat@gmail.com ... translating film titles from the English language into the Vietnamese language Then they will try to find ways to improve the quality of GT‘s Vietnamese translations of English film titles in the future... STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I now confirm that I am the author of the thesis on the quality of Google Translate‟s Vietnamese translations of English film titles This topic is the result of my research,... examine the quality of GT‘s Vietnamese translations of English film titles by answering two research questions: What are the error types in GT‘s Vietnamese translations of the English film titles?