The eternal antagonism between humans and technology: A study on machine translation

Abstract

This paper is about a controversial issue in recent times: machine translation. First of all, we will present the definitions of basic concepts such as machine translation and machine translation programme. Afterwards, we will expose the process that is carried out to perform a human translation and a machine translation, all followed by the limits of machine translation, the utility of the text corpus, the post-editing process and the objectives, purpose, functions and tools of machine translation programmes. In addition, we will also comment on the different translations that can be obtained with these translation systems depending on the type of the text that we intend to translate and we will present a brief reflection about the positive and negative points that machine translation has in order to reach a conclusion about whether it is suitable or not to get high quality translations. Finally, we will carry out a practical analysis in which several sentences will be translated through different machine translation programmes and prepare a comparative table in which we ca clearly see the differences, similarities and errors provided by the different programmes.