Literary translation humam VS machine: an essay about online translation

Abstract

In a world in which cultural barriers are becoming increasingly tenuous, the translation has achieved a prominent role, especially that which is done quickly, by the 'click' of a ‘mouse’. This essay’s main goal is to give special attention to the literary genre and to the online translation tool Google Translator, widely used either by laymen or scholars, and to show evidence of the indispensability of human wit in a translation meant to be well done. This study is based on a literary review of prominent authors such as Delille et al. (1986), John Milton (1993) and J.C. Catford (1980), with emphasis on the latter and on the Translation categories proposed by him in his book "A Theory language of Translation". Also highlighting the matter of polysemous literary translation, we aim to shed light on the translator’s craft and the fallible nature of online translation. To better illustrate these principles in practice, the methodology was to perform a comparative analysis involving the original literary text Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) in English, its online translation given by GT and a translation into Brazilian Portuguese performed by Antonio Alves Cury (Ed. Abril, 1995), identifying and analyzing the degrees of textual equivalence according to the following categories: volume, levels and order (Catford, 1980). The results have led to the knowledge and elucidation of the differences between the online translation and one done by a person, especially when it comes to translating semantically complex texts as a result of creativity and high capacity of human expression.