On the Translation Quality of Google Translate: With a Concentration on Adjectives

Translation, whose first traces date back at least to 3000 BC (Newmark, 1988), has always been considered time-consuming and labor-consuming. In view of this, experts have made numerous efforts to develop some mechanical systems which can reduce part of this time and labor. The advancement of computers in the second half of the twentieth century paved the ground for the invention of machine translation (MT). One of the most commonly used MT systems is Google Translate, which currently supports 64 languages, including Persian. In consideration of the fact that Google Translate is easily accessible, it is almost always the first MT system to which Iranian users resort for meeting their translation needs, the reason which prompted the researcher to conduct a study on the output quality of the English-to-Persian translations produced by this MT system. To narrow down the study, the researcher decided to investigate the translation of adjectives of all types, i.e. simple adjectives, adjectives of similarity, comparatives and superlatives. To this end, a test suite of 140 sentences (randomly chosen among 1400 sentences) containing all types of adjectives was prepared and translated by Google Translate. The analysis of the results revealed that Google Translate translates simple, comparative and superlative adjectives fairly accurately and naturally, while it fails to distinguish adjectives of similarity and, thus, translates them quite inaccurately.