The Translation of Adolescence Language by means of Apertium, Systran and Google Translate

María Napoletano; Andrés Canga Alonso

doi:10.58859/rael.v23i1.585

Authors

María Napoletano University of La Rioja
Andrés Canga Alonso University of La Rioja

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.58859/rael.v23i1.585

Keywords:

Machine translation; adolescents’ speech; COLT; LIC; mistranslation

Abstract

The present paper explores the translation of adolescents’ speech from English into Spanish using three free online translation tools (Apertium, Systran and Google Translate), and two corpora based on oral communication (COLT and LIC). Additionally, errors were classified in terms of accuracy and fluency, and a revised version after post-editing is provided in order to overcome these mistranslations. Our findings show that the errors these MT applications produce have to do with the translation of cultural aspects, abbreviations, proper names of cities and people, as well as the loss of coherence of some extracts due to the character limit imposed by some of the tools used. Finally, emphasis is placed on the need to open new lines of research considering proverbs and idioms with a wider range of data.

Author Biographies

María Napoletano, University of La Rioja

María Cira Napoletano holds a Degree in English Studies from the University of La Rioja (Spain). Her main research focuses on machine translation. Currently, she is enrolled in specialization courses in Natural Language Processing (NLP), demonstrating a dedicated commitment to advancing understanding in this domain.

Andrés Canga Alonso, University of La Rioja

Andrés Canga-Alonso (Ph.D) is tenured Associate Professor of English Studies at the University of La Rioja (Spain). His current research focuses on EFL learners’ cultural vocabulary, pedagogical and machine translation. He has published widely on EFL learners’ cultural, receptive, and productive vocabulary in national and international peer-reviewed journals.