Google Translate: Error Analysis in Spanish-to-English Translation in Texts about Nutrition
Keywords:
Online machine translation; errors; Google Translate; nutrition; scientific articlesAbstract
Online Machine Translation (MT) emerges as a tool to solve the problem that non-English-speaking scientists face when publishing their research. One of these tools is Google Translate (GT), but it is necessary to know how it works in specific nutrition texts to exploit its potential and recognize its limitations. An exploratory-descriptive analysis of automatic translation errors with GT was performed, using articles from an Argentinian nutrition journal. It was carried out in three stages: error recording, quantification and classification. Many errors were noted to have occurred due to unclear wording of the original article. The most frequent errors were the translation of acronyms and technical terms. An average of 54 errors were recorded per article. The study led to the construction of a matrix of analysis of the most common types of errors and it was possible to record empirical evidence of MT errors in the specific area of nutrition.
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