Machine translation of literary texts: a comparison with human translation
Summary
The purpose of this work was to investigate how Basque machine translation performs in translating literary works. In order to do so, we chose several literary texts, translated them into Basque using the Basque neural machine translation system Itzuli, and compared the resulting texts with those translated by 7 translators who have worked in the field of literary translation. First, we analyze the objective errors made by machine translation. Next, we compare the machine and human translations, text by text, and cite the most striking examples. To conclude, we offer our reflections on the subject, based on the results of our study, focusing on the dangers of machine translation and its possible uses in literature.
