The quality of google translate’s Vietnamese translations of English film titles = Chất lượng dịch tiêu đề phim tiếng Anh sang tiếng Việt của Google Translate

Abstract

Google Translate (GT), a free online translation tool, is increasingly used, but the translation quality of GT is not really good. This article presents the results of a study on the quality of GT in translating 130 English film titles into Vietnamese. The study used content analysis to analyze the data, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results show that GT did not make any morphological errors, but it committed orthographic errors, lexical errors, semantic errors, and syntactic errors at very different rates according to Farrús et al.'s framework⁹ of translation errors. Out of 130 English film titles, GT transferred only 16 film titles correctly, and GT made 141 errors in the remaining 114 film titles. Among four error types, semantic errors are the most dominant. The second and third positions belong to lexical errors and syntactic errors, respectively. Orthographic errors take the last place. The result of the study indicates that GT fails to translate English film titles into Vietnamese ones. In other words, the translation quality of GT in translating film titles from English into Vietnamese is low. Implications for GT users, GT technicians, and other researchers are suggested.